Is it worth focusing on marginal gains?
Let’s start with a story…
The fate of British Cycling changed one day in 2003. The GB Cycling Team hired Dave Brailsford. Since 1908, British riders had only won a single Olympic gold medal, and fared even worse in cycling’s biggest race, the Tour de France. In 110 years, no British cyclist had won the event.
In fact, the performance of British riders had been so deeply underwhelming that one of the top bike manufacturers in Europe refused to sell bikes to the team because they were afraid that it would hurt sales if other professionals saw the Brits using their gear. What a burn!
Enter stage left Dave Brailsford.
He led and helped develop the GB Cycling team to become one of the most respected and successful Olympic Programmes of all time, across all sports. Just five years after Brailsford took over, the British Cycling team dominated all road and track cycling events at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. They won an astounding 60% of the gold medals available. Four years later, when the Olympic Games came to London, the British cycling team raised the bar again, setting 9 x Olympic records and 7 x world records.
2010 was also significant for Brailsford. His dream of a British professional road cycling team was realised in the shape of Team Sky. He was Team Principal.
In 2012, Dave once again placed Britain in the history books when Team Sky’s Bradley Wiggins became the first British rider to win the Tour de France. Dave led Team Sky to a second, third and fourth Tour de France win with Chris Froome in 2015, 2016 and 2017 (alongside three consecutive Grand Tour wins: Tour de France, Vuelta a Espana, and Giro d’Italia). Team Sky’s fifth Tour de France success was with a third British rider, Geraint Thomas in 2018.
Dave Brailsford had been hired to put British Cycling on a new trajectory. What made him different from previous coaches was his relentless commitment to a strategy that he referred to as “the aggregation of marginal gains”, which was the philosophy of searching for a tiny margin of improvement in everything we do. Brailsford said:
“The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improve it by 1 percent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together.”
Dave and his team began making small adjustments. They redesigned the bike seats to make them more comfortable and rubbed alcohol on the tires for a better grip. They asked riders to wear electrically heated over-shorts to maintain ideal muscle temperature while riding and used bio-feedback sensors to monitor how each athlete responded to a particular workout. The team tested various fabrics in a wind tunnel and had their outdoor riders switch to indoor racing suits, which proved to be lighter and more aerodynamic.
But they didn’t stop there! The team continued to look for 1% improvements in unexpected areas. They tested massage gels to see which one brought the fastest muscle recovery. They examined the type of pillow and mattress that led to the best night’s sleep for each rider. They even painted the inside of the team truck white, which helped them spot little bits of dust that would normally slip by unnoticed but could degrade the performance of the finely tuned bikes.
As these and hundreds of other small improvements accumulated, the results came faster than anyone could have imagined.
During the ten-year span from 2007 to 2017, British cyclists won 178 world championships, 66 Olympic or Paralympic gold medals and captured five Tour de France victories in what is widely regarded as the most successful run in cycling history.
How does this happen? How does a team of previously pretty ordinary athletes transform into world champions with tiny changes that would seem to make a modest difference at best? Why do small improvements (marginal gains) accumulate into such remarkable results, and how can we replicate this approach?
The Aggregation of Marginal Gains
Too often, we assume that massive success requires massive action. Improving by 1 percent doesn’t feel like a big enough deal and feels highly unlikely to make a difference. But what about the long game? The difference a tiny improvement can make over time is huge. Check this out:
If you get 1 percent better at something each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done, sold! Conversely, if you get 1 percent worse each day for one year, you’ll decline nearly down to zero, not cool. What starts as a small win or a minor setback accumulates into something much, much more.
So, over time, these small 1 percent improvements or deteriorations compound, and we suddenly see a huge gap between people who are making slightly optimised choices and those who aren’t.
“Success is a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgement, repeated every day” – Jim Rohn
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