October - 2019CONSTRUCTIONTECHREVIEW.COM8IN MYOPINIONA few years ago, someone told me about a pitch pro-cess she was involved in.She turned up to the first presentation from one of the candidate companies and was soon enthralled by a captivating tale of how the agency had learned a lesson from UK cycling. Dave Brailsford had transformed British cycling with the philosophy of `marginal gains'--the idea that by improving everything you did by a trivial 1 per cent, in aggregate you would have accomplished a massive step change versus the competition.The pitch team pledged that while they had no strategic magic wand, they would use marginal gains to help transform the client's business. My friend told me that the client team left the first pitch with their imagination tingling.They walked in to the next pitch and the lead presenter came out in lycra, pushing a bike.Sure enough of the four presentations they saw that day, three talked about marginal gains. Everyone had stolen the idea. What was once a new idea quickly becomes a bit of a tired cliché. I was interested then to encounter the story of where British cycling went next in Owen Slot's outstanding book `The Talent Code.'Slot describes how more than just appropriating marginal gains the philosophy was to question every single assumption to see how it could be improved. They styled this as `challenging the tyranny of the normal'. At the Athens Olympics in 2004 the Australians had finished in the gold position with Team GB in second.However, the race was not even close. The Aussie team had set such a breathtaking pace that it feel like they would be untouchable for years.The job of turning the team's performance round was given to Matt Parker. Parker was not either a cycling coach or even WHY SHOULD WE BREAK THE NORMS?By Bruce Daisley, VP, TwitterThe creation of information networks has given rise to a sense that we need to keep everyone in the loop because we can include everyone in every operationBruce Daisley
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