by Kerr, James
‘Races are won by a fraction of a second,’ wrote John Wooden. ‘National Championship games by a single point. That fraction of a second or a single point is the result of relevant details performed along the way.’
Marginal gains have been made famous in recent times through the work of Clive Woodward with his England rugby squad and Dave Brailsford with British Cycling and Team Sky.
When Woodward took over the England rugby team in 1997 he inherited an archaic parallel universe in which the coach didn’t have a desk at Rugby House and, despite a huge advantage in player numbers and finances, England were, in Graham Henry’s memorable phrase, ‘world champions at wasting talent’.
Woodward brought in Humphrey Walters, a consultant who ran a ‘learning and development’ company called MaST International. Together, they set out to effect wholesale culture change, restructuring the players’ experience ‘from driveway to driveway’. That is, from the moment the English players left home to play for their country to the moment they returned, everything would be considered, analysed and aligned with the team’s values, purpose and strategy.
This meant deep and expensive structural changes of personnel, training venues and the organizational relationship between the team and its employers, even the way the team travelled to games. ‘You can’t,’ Walters told Woodward, ‘fire a cannon out of a canoe.’
According to Woodward (in his book, Winning), Walters taught him ‘that success can be attributed to how a team worked together under pressure, how they understood the importance of team work and loyalty, and how they were willing to do a hundred things just 1% better’.
This final aspect Woodward called ‘the critical non-essentials’. A fresh jersey at halftime, the same bus for every game, a more inspiring locker room at Twickenham – every little thing helped Woodward’s England win the 2003 Rugby World Cup.
Leaders are learners.
Britain’s Olympic cyclists called it ‘marginal gains’. In their preparation for a home Olympics in 2012, in which they won an incredible seven out of ten gold medals, the details included:
° customized aerodynamic helmets
° ‘hot pants’ – worn to keep thigh muscles warm between races
° sweat-resistant clothing
° alcohol sprayed on wheels to enhance traction at the start
° hypoallergenic pillows to help stop riders catching colds
At Team Sky, it also involved transporting Bradley Wiggins’s bed throughout the 2,173-mile, twenty-three-day course of the Tour de France, over the Channel to London, up to his home for a break in Lancashire, and back down to London again for the Olympics.
Sometimes the small things can take a big effort. And cost a lot of money.
‘The whole principle,’ Brailsford explains to the BBC, ‘came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and improved it by 1 per cent, you will get a significant increase when you put it all together.’
At McLaren F1, they call it ‘Tenths’. The entire team is galvanized by the idea of shaving tenths of a second off the lap time. All F1 teams do it, of course, but at McLaren they make it their central operating principle.
Marginal gain can be technical, physical, practical, operational, and even psychological. In the film Any Given Sunday, the Al Pacino character calls it ‘Inches’:
—— You find out that life is just a game of inches. So is football. Because in either game, life or football, the margin for error is so small . . . On this team, we fight for that inch. On this team, we tear ourselves, and everyone around us to pieces for that inch . . . Cause we know when we add up all those inches that’s going to make the fucking difference between WINNING and LOSING.
‘We talked about a learning environment,’ says Graham Henry, ‘and everyone getting better and everyone getting bigger every day, so if each player improves by 5 per cent minimum, 10 per cent, 15 per cent, the team’s going to improve. If you put these collective percentages together you’ve got something special.’
Marginal gains: 100 things done 1 per cent better to deliver cumulative competitive advantage.
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Creating a learning environment demands that leaders step back and look at their team, business or organization as what engineers call a closed or bound system: with a defined parameter in which every input is known. Though it’s clearly easier to define parameters around an elite sports team, for any team it is important to understand where the team boundaries begin and where they end. It’s basic border control.
‘You are a product of your environment,’ says author W. Clement Stone, ‘so choose the environment that will best develop you towards your objective. Analyze your life in terms of your environment. Are the things around you helping you towards success – or are they holding you back?’ After all, ‘It’s not the mountains ahead that wear you out,’ said Muhammad Ali, ‘it’s the pebble in your shoe.’
By working hard to control the environment, the All Blacks seek to eliminate the pebbles in their shoes.
Saying yes to high performance means first saying no. ‘When you look at the rituals, for instance,’ says Gilbert Enoka, ‘what we’ve actually done . . . is to strip things out . . . What hasn’t changed are the “go-tos” that drive the legacy . . . the art is knowing what to spit out.’
‘People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on,’ Apple founder Steve Jobs told the writer Walter Isaacson, ‘but that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that are there. You’ve got to pick carefully.’
In the England set-up under Woodward, Humphrey Walters likened it to taking all the furniture out of a house – all the chairs and tables and fixtures and fittings, and the mysterious stuff that accumulates in drawers – and only putting back what is useful.
This is as much about controlling the psychological environment as it is the physical. Computer programmers have a phrase: Garbage In/Garbage Out. If we apply the analogy, this means:
° the verbal, visual and gestural language that we allow to take up residence in our heads;
° the toxins like alcohol, drugs or sugar that we allow to take up residence in our bodies (and minds);
° the people we allow to take up space in our lives.
Psychologists talk about stimulus response – whether it’s the influence certain people have on us, or certain substances have on our metabolism, we must be careful what we ingest.
We have to be careful what furniture we reintroduce to our metaphorical house. Key to a high-performing learning environment is the quality of the material that is allowed to enter – to permeate our ‘bound system’ and become the stimulus for our response.
The All Blacks are notoriously judicious in eliminating undue influence; equally, they are curious and innovative when it comes to seeking out stimuli, knowledge and insights from other people and organizations.
Coaches Henry, Smith and Hansen have visited other teams – the New York Giants, Sydney Swans, Melbourne Storm, among others – to better understand their culture, standards and systems. The All Blacks mantra ‘No Dickheads’ was shamelessly stolen from the Sydney Swans.
Scrum coach Mike Cron is also a student of sport. ‘Part of my NZ contract allows me to go anywhere in the world to upskill myself,’ he told the Samoa Times. ‘I’ve been to sumo wrestling camps in Japan, judo camp in Japan, the NY Knicks, Yankees and Giants, NFL camp in Florida to pick up ideas.’
The team brought in an eye-coach who introduced them to various exercises to improve spatial awareness, and psychiatrists and Karate black belts to work on the All Blacks’ untimely habit of crumbling under World Cup pressure. Enoka also brought in the wisdom of Māori artist and kapa haka exponent, Derek Lardelli, to help reconnect the team to their identity and develop a new haka – ‘Kapo O Panga’ – to express their sense of self.
Like all good teachers the All Blacks coaches are students, not only of the game b
ut also of human nature. Like all good teachers, they love to learn.
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In the run-up to the Rugby World Cup, the coaches brought in a man called Jock Hobbs to address the team.
‘A fabulous man,’ says Graham Henry, ‘and a sad situation.’ Hobbs was a former All Blacks captain and, until illness forced him to stand down, CEO of the NZRU. He had leukaemia, a condition that has since claimed his life.
He spoke to the team about the inspiring effect they were having on the country, and about his personal challenges and how they related to the team.
‘Get up every day and be the best you can be,’ he said. ‘Be the best in the world. . . . give your all for every second of every minute of the seven games you’ll play. You can do no more than that. Guys, never let the music die in you.’
Leaders are teachers.
Another speaker was a man called Willie Apiata, a recipient of the Victoria Cross, the highest award for gallantry. His medal citation for the action, which took place in a remote valley in Afghanistan, reads:
—— In total disregard of his own safety, Lance Corporal Apiata stood up and lifted his comrade bodily. He then carried him across the seventy metres of broken, rocky and fire-swept ground, fully exposed in the glare of battle to heavy enemy fire . . . Having delivered his wounded companion to relative shelter [he] re-armed himself and rejoined the fight in counter-attack.
His message about playing for the team and relying on each other – ‘otherwise you die’ – was clear. At the end, Graham Henry says, ‘the All Blacks stood up and gave a standing ovation to Willie and Willie was clapping the All Blacks. They both had the utmost respect.’
‘The environment that people live in,’ wrote nineteenth-century chemist Ellen Swallow Richards, ‘is the environment they learn to live in, respect and perpetuate.’
When the environment is dedicated to learning, the score, as Bill Walsh says, takes care of itself. Leaders are teachers – our job is to lead people through uncertainty and confusion and into self-knowledge and self-possession. ‘The ability to help the people around me self-actualize their goals,’ says Walsh, ‘underlies the single aspect of my abilities and the label that I value most – teacher.’
Sometime it only takes one encounter – one teacher – to change a life, and many lives after that.
Successful leaders look beyond their own field to discover new approaches, learn best practices and push the margins. Then they pass on what they have learned.
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Sean Fitzpatrick’s teacher was a man called Guy Davis, who was coaching Fitzpatrick’s lower grade rugby team. As Fitzpatrick writes in Winning Matters, he changed the young player’s life forever.
He told the future All Blacks captain that ‘it didn’t matter what level of talent had been given to us, what size we were or how fast or slow we ran. It was what we did with that talent that we had that counted . . . no excuses and no exceptions. “The only thing I want you to be is the best that you can possibly be.”’
It’s a lesson Fitzpatrick has carried with him all his life and passes on to all he meets.
‘What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments,’ to paraphrase the Greek statesman Pericles, ‘but what is woven into the lives of others.’ Your legacy is that which you teach.
Create a Learning Environment
Human beings are motivated by purpose, autonomy and a drive towards mastery. Accomplished leaders create an environment in which their people can develop their skills, their knowledge and their character. This leads to a learning environment and a culture of curiosity, innovation and continuous improvement. By finding the 100 things that can be done just 1 per cent better, leaders create incremental and cumulative advantage, and organizations see an upswing in performance and results. In creating a coherent learning environment, it pays to both eliminate unhelpful elements – clearing out the furniture – and to introduce insightful and inspiring influences.
Create a Learning Environment
Leaders are teachers.
—— Te tīmatanga o te mātauranga ko te wahangū, te wāhanga tuarua ko te whakarongo.
The first stage of learning is silence, the second stage is listening.
VI
WHĀNAU
—— Ā muri kia mau ki te kawau mārō, whanake ake, whanake ake.
Hold to the spearhead formation of the kawau.
NO DICKHEADS
Follow the spearhead
Taranaki, New Zealand
A flock of birds – kawau, a kind of cormorant – carve a graceful V across the breaking day. One bird leads, another follows, another takes the lead, in an endless synchronized support system, much like the peloton of professional cyclists.
Ornithologists say that flying this way is 70 per cent more efficient than flying solo. If a bird falls out of formation, it feels the wind resistance and rejoins the flock. Should one fall behind, others stay back until it can fly again. No bird gets left behind.
It is an extraordinary organizational dynamic – and the perfect metaphor for the Māori concept of whānau.
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Whānau means to ‘be born’ or ‘give birth’.
For Māori, it means extended family: parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, children and cousins. In the vernacular, it has come to mean our family of friends: our mates, our tribe, our team.
In Māori mythology, whānau is symbolized by a spearhead, an image derived in turn from the flight formation of the kawau. A spearhead has three tips – but to work properly, all the force must move in one direction.
And so it is with whānau.
For a whānau to function, everyone must move towards the same point. You are free to choose the course you take, but the spearhead is most effective if you all work together.
Fly in formation. Be of one mind. Follow the spearhead.
This is the ‘being of team’ and the essence of the successful organization.
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‘We need people who will work hard and work hard for their brother,’ says Gilbert Enoka. ‘We know that is a pretty good formula – because that way you get contribution.’
The definition of a great team, says Kevin Roberts, the global CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, is one that is ‘in flow more frequently than the opposition’. For collective flow to occur, he believes, organizations must be of ‘one mind’.
The legendary Phil Jackson, former head coach of the Chicago Bulls basketball team, calls this the ‘Group Mind’ and it was the basis of his extraordinary coaching career. When Jackson first brought Michael Jordon to Chicago, he was the league’s top scorer in each of his first six seasons, far and away the best player in the NBA, yet he had never won a title.
‘A great player can only do so much on his own,’ said Jackson in his book Sacred Hoops. ‘No matter how breathtaking his one-on-one moves, if he is out of sync psychologically with everyone else, the team will never achieve the harmony needed to win a championship.’
‘This is the struggle that every leader faces,’ Jackson says. ‘How to get members of the team who are driven by the quest for individual glory to give themselves over wholeheartedly to the group effort.’
Jackson would quote Rudyard Kipling:
For the Strength of the Pack is the Wolf,
and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.
‘On a good team there are no superstars,’ Jackson’s mentor, Red Holzman, taught him. ‘There are great players who show they are great players by being able to play with others as a team . . . they make sacrifices; they do things necessary to help the team win.’
The results of Jackson’s egoless approach speak for themselves. When Michael Jordon retired in 2003 he had won six championship rings and was voted Most Valuable Player in all of those finals. Turning his ‘me’ into a ‘we’ had alchemized his reputation into trophies and medals. Being a great team player made him a great player, the greatest of all time.
The strength of the wolf is the pack.
> ˜
‘It’s everything in a team, to be honest,’ says All Black legend Andrew Mehrtens. ‘It’s about thinking about the team’s interest before yourself . . . if it’s not good for the team, don’t say it and don’t do it.’
‘We’ve all got our certain role to play,’ he says, ‘and if you can have that respect within the group, then you are going to go a lot further . . . if the guy like a goal kicker can respect the ability, the difficulty, of the guy throwing into the lineout, or how tough it is for a guy to hold in the scrum on the right-hand side . . .’
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Owen Eastwood says that if the first steps in developing a high performance culture are to:
1. select on character,
2. understand your strategy for change,
3. co-write a purpose,
4. devolve leadership and
5. encourage a learning environment.
The sixth and arguably most important step is to begin to turn the standards into action. The best way of doing this is through peer-to-peer enforcement. ‘Respect as a value is vague,’ says Eastwood, ‘but has impact when players decide this means no phones in meetings, no talking over each other, etc. Values alone risk becoming wallpaper and meaningless.’ But, he adds, ‘defining and enforcing these standards needs to be from bottom up.’
‘These are young guys, they are on television, they’ve got lots of money, they’ve never had it before, birds are after them,’ says Anton Oliver, ‘but if you’re not reflecting the team culture . . . boys will fuck you.’
The strength of the wolf is the pack.
It used to be called ‘the back seat of the bus’, the natural hierarchy that developed within an All Blacks side and which was most easily seen in the seating arrangement on the team coach: senior players at the back, rookies up at the front; non-All Blacks strictly not welcome.
