The successful cycling coach David Brailsford coined the term “marginal gains”. If we improved every choice we made by 1% we would create extraordinary success.
David Brailsford lives in the land of the impossible. The zone of marginal gains. When you are working with diminishing returns you might well take 1% as a good result.
Most of us don’t live in the land of the impossible. We live in the land of possible. The place where decisions live or die. More effort may not make much of a difference.
And that’s strange because if more of us lived in the land of necessary things would improve very quickly. With little effort, we would get a lot back, a lot more than 1 %.
It might somehow be less heroic. Even obvious. Or below us.
But it is clear to me that creating significant change is not about management speak and marginal gains it is about doing the work of necessary.
And that requires an honest conversation about where we start from.