Marginal gains….the 1% rule.

I recently read a book on high performance cultures and it was full of ways and ideas on how to manage and create high performance teams. This was a an example of a specific sporting team (a global great!) who invented and re-invented themselves often in order to stay at the top. One of the concepts that really stuck with me was that of “marginal gains” and this specific team held this art as a reason for thier success — or the 1% rule. What is it you ask?.

Marginal gains (1% rule) — It’s the idea that everything we do can be incrementally improved, each and every day of our lives. We build something, we do something, every iteration adds to the output towards your goal. Every iteration should add atlas 1% value.

Go for 1% improvements — see the value over time.

Think of this, every 1% you add will amount slowly and if you take the example of a small team, say 5 people — every 1% a value each day equates to 5% in total for the week per person— multiply this for the team for a week, imagine the size of the incremental improvements for the year!.

That’s an awful lot of marginal gains / 1%’s made in the year when aggregated. You might actually meet a deadline or two or even change the company.

The theory of marginal gains or the 1% rule has been used in industry for a while. I particularly like the example in sports as the impact and results are seen immediately. Take Cycling for example, the British Cycling team have been prescribing the art of marginal gains for many years. Every race, every event, event data point, every interaction is tracked, measured and then a goal is set for improvement. the goal is simple, get better by 1% in each domain which improves the overall goal which is to — Win gold!

Marginal gains attributes to the success of the British cycling team.

Personally, I’m a big fan of marginal gains culture and set myself measures and try to improve on them on a daily basis. Some examples include numbers of steps taken on a daily basis to the number of success outcomes I have in a given day..

Try out marginal gains in your life or business today and see the improvements over time. Just remember to measure and check.