As it's The Learning from Failure Conference on Friday (still a few places left if you rush, you can book here) it's worth reflecting back on Black Box Thinking.
One of the really poignant parts of that was the description of David Brailsford from Team Sky and how he described goal setting and achieving. I realise that there is a question mark over this with the Bradley Wiggins affair but lets park that for a little while; I might write about that later.
Basically Brailsford describes climbing a mountain step by step, even with a blindfold on, to get to the top one baby step in front of the other - that's marginal gains. Making small changes to an already existing plan, programme or organisation to make it better and better until reaching the top of the mountain. That's one way to change... the other is to jump. Fire yourself into hyperspace to end up on the next mountain which is even higher, more challenging and more terrifying.
If truth be told there are only a few of us that get the privilege of doing that. Many things block our way - circumstance, events, general reluctance to take a risk. Clearly it doesn't always work (although up to this point it worked extremely well for Brailsford as he jumped from British cycling to professional Team Sky)
For me one happened in 2008 with another in 2013.
We're on the verge of jumping into hyperspace again, I hope I can talk about this soon because there are various little chess pieces that need to fall into position to allow us to go.
It is worth remembering that marginal gains are great and small, incremental changes are fine but unless you want to build a house at the top of the mountain and rest, you have to jump to the next one.
Blog Post Number: 1087
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