Can you apply marginal gains to public service?
I recently chatted with Kelly Doonan about the use of marginal gains as an improvement methodology in local government.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that it has filtered through to local government given that cycling has been taken up by many a white middle class man in the UK, which is quite reflective of the makeup of leaders in the sector. Thankfully lots of people working to change that, both within cycling and public services. Sir Dave Brailsford has been lauded way beyond the sport, so it’s about time that the public sector came calling.
Our conversation was well timed given that Rouleur’s ‘Innovators’ issue had just been released. It includes an excellent article that examines Team Ineos (formerly Team Sky)’s innovation methodology. The Marginal Gains approach essentially improves lots of smaller aspects of work by 1% so that cumulatively, those changes make a big difference. Richard Moore quotes Paul Barratt (Team Ineos’ Head of Innovation) in the article:
“Improvements in equipment can produce ‘step-changes’ in performance, whereas tweaks to the way an athlete lives, trains, eats and rests, tend to produce incremental improvements.”
It’s in these tweaks that Sky / Ineos have excelled.
Why was this approach so successful?
Although their focus was on lots of small improvements, they dramatically reconsidered what a cycling team can look like. They changed not just steps and processes, but crucially the thinking behind them. The team used their incredible resources to focus on things that had never been looked at before, including the use of food trucks and supplying their team with their own mattresses.
This is the thing — the only marginal thing about these gains was their impact. The effort and resource behind them were huge. Anybody that promotes these as tiny changes for big results is being disingenuous. Collectively these gains were underpinned by a vision that was radically different. As a new team they were able to circumnavigate the existing cultures and behaviours of the peloton. They were able to question the things that other teams did as a matter of course. And ultimately, the accrual of lots of marginal gains works when you have a clear aim. That aim was winning the Tour De France, which they did incredibly successfully between 2012–19.
The effect of workplace culture
We can’t copy and paste solutions from one context to another when we’re talking about complex environments. whatsthepont has recently written about this in a post on ‘The Ministry of the Predictable. Eliminating Uncertainty, Risk, and Resilience.’ Context and culture is key. He has also captured this brilliantly in another post on the dangers of imposing external cultures, which focuses on ‘Social Practice Theory and MAMILs.’ He examines the practice associated with cycling and how that may or may not change behaviour:
“Having financial incentives to buy a bike and having a publicity push isn’t going to create a ‘Dutch Cycling Culture’ in your organisation, if the ‘meaning’ associated with it alienates 97% of the workforce, sorry MAMILs.”
Looking at Social Practice Theory, it’s worth considering whether using a methodology that seems alien to lots of people will help to bring them along on a change journey. Any improvement methodology should be a good cultural fit. I remember going to the Office for National Statistics to learn about how they were using stats as part of their improvement work, which struck a chord with both their improvement team and workforce.
And that’s really the key. Individually we can be motivated by narratives of change and success. But it’s important to think about how that resonates with and makes sense to the people that we work with. Change management or innovation teams may have the knowledge and materials to make change, but we also need to factor in the context and people’s perception of that methodology. It’s not that we have the answers that people need. We need to view our colleagues in terms of their strengths, not as people who lack understanding of an improvement tool. We need the knowledge that people have of the context and the meaning of a service in order to make any change a success.
