The First Dogma: Marginal Gains

The first dogma of Reason-Ability is the concept of Marginal Gains, which is simply the idea that it’s easier to get 1% better at 100 things, than 100% better at one thing.

The Greatest Team On Earth?

My favourite modern example of this principle is the astonishing success of the British Olympic Cycling team from 2008 to 2016.

Although I admit I could be biased, there’s a compelling argument for rating the British Cycling team as the greatest current sporting outfit on the planet — perhaps the greatest sporting team ever. Their gold-medal tally in the Olympic Games in 2008, 2012 and 2016 was not only higher than any other individual country, it was higher than the medal haul from all 206 Olympic countries combined!

If they’d been a nation, they’d have come 10th in the overall Olympic medals table, one place above Australia.

That’s more than dominant, it’s world-changing. There is no sporting team in recent history that has ever come close.

Dave Brailsford, the chief architect of the team’s rise to supremacy over the last 10 years, puts it all down to an approach called Marginal Gains.

Applied to cycling, the idea is simply that you break down the task of getting your bike to go fast into many small pieces, and focus on improving each one of these by a small percentage. These gains are all marginal in themselves, but they multiply together to create a compounding overall improvement.

So, what Brailsford did was find a whole bunch of things that ‘might’ make a difference, and work on improving each one by the tiniest amount.

One of the most peculiar was the idea of training the team to wash their hands properly! The thought being that washing hands properly would lead to a lower incidence of sickness — which consequently would mean fewer disruptions to the team’s training programme. Another was for the team to always take their own pillow when travelling, to improve the quality of sleep — a tip apparently inspired by the Royal Ballet. (The UK’s national ballet organisation.)

This approach worked so well that British Cycling entered a team for the Tour de France, possibly the most gruelling cycling event in the world, for the first time in 2010, with the aim to win within 5 years.

They achieved their goal by 2012, three years ahead of schedule.

More than that, they not only won it in 2012 with Bradley Wiggins, but their next best, Chris Froome, was second placed rider overall, and went on to win it in his own right in 2013, 2015, 2016 and 2017. He retired injured following a bad crash in 2014.

So, from nowhere to total domination in 2 years. That should not happen in the world of international sport. Especially a team sport that depends on physical peak endurance like cycling. It doesn’t make any sense until you start appreciating the power of the marginal gains concept.

Beyond Cycling

Clearly, the approach worked astonishingly well for the British cycling team, but can the concept of Marginal Gains be applied to other areas in life?

How about Rugby? England won the world cup for the first time ever in 2003 and this is what the coach Clive Woodward said about his team’s success:

“Winning the Rugby world cup was not about doing one thing 100% better, but about doing 100 things 1% better.”

— Sir Clive Woodward

Hmmm…

I’m sure we could find many more instances in sport, business, education and life, but let’s stop there and just think about how this might be applied to the idea of mastering anything you so desire.

Let’s hypothesise that, through dividing a goal into component parts, we could reasonably expect to get just 5% better at each component during a programme of implementation. The compounding effect over a total of 13 components will generate an astonishing 189% increase in performance.

What about going for a quite achievable 10% improvement? That gives an overall percentage gain of 345%.

And how about pushing the boat out a little and going for a 15% increase per component on average? That leads us to an astonishing increase in effectiveness of 615%.

Of course, numbers can be a misleading construct when applied to human domains, but it should nonetheless be fairly easy to conclude that an approach based on mastering one or two areas is not only likely to be harder — but it’s also probably going to have less of an impact on performance overall.

So, that’s it. The first dogma of Reason-Ability: Marginal Gains.

Does it seem reasonable?