Aggregate small, incremental gains and achieve massive improvement

In this 4 minute highlights reel from a talk at the London Business Forum, Sir David Brailsford CBE gives some insight into how he made Team Sky so successful.

Sir David Brailsford CBE – Marginal Gains.

It doesn’t matter how small the improvement, we’re gonna do it.

We’re going to create a culture which is about this idea of continuous learning, continuous improvement.

Forget the result. If you are worried about the bearing of the result. The chances of you performing well at that particular moment, on that particular day, is reduced.

I absolutely believe in giving people as much ownership as possible.

You can walk a thousand miles – you can only do it a step at a time. But it doesn’t take long before you’ve done quite a few steps.

If you go after all these incremental gains, aggregating them together, we were capable of getting better.

Sir Dave Brailsford CBE is a world-renowned former British cycling coach and current Team Principal and Director of Sport at INEOS. With over two decades of experience, the British Cycling Hall of Famer has engaged audiences with his experience-filled speeches and become one of the most inspirational motivational speakers in the industry.

As the current Team Principal and Director of Sport at Team Ineos Grenadiers, Dave brings experience and expertise to the team he has been a part of since 2010 when they began racing as Team Sky. The team received several cycling awards and honours during his term. He also led many athletes to cycling victories, including two consecutive Tour de France wins (2012-13) and another four successive Tours de France triumphs from (2015-18).

In his former role as performance director of British Cycling, Dave gained much-acclaimed fame, particularly for his concept of ‘marginal gains’. This philosophy states that one should aim to make all possible improvements in any area of a sport, no matter how small or insignificant the progress may seem, even if by a margin of 1%. Although initially regarded as counterintuitive, this concept has since been adopted by other athletes and has become widely accepted in different industries such as economics and the UK education policy.