Process Improvement: This Coach Improved Every Tiny Thing by 1 Percent

Process Improvement: This Coach Improved Every Tiny Thing by 1 Percent


This article by James Clear touches on what I covered in the previous post about journaling. As I mentioned I found that using a journal to record my progress in tennis technique, tactics and my mental/emotional state have helped me become a better player through incremental improvement. Clear's article shows how the British cycling team, which had never won the Tour de France, ended up winning it in 2012 as well as pulling in 70% of the gold medals in cycling in the 2012 Olympics. They did it through “aggregation of marginal gains” as described by Dave Brailsford, General Manager and Performance Director for Team Sky, Great Britain’s professional cycling team.

Keeping a journal helps me keep track of where I'm improving and where I need to spend more time and effort.

While I'm on the subject, Clear also suggests it's better for us to focus on the system we put in place to accomplish goals, rather than the goals themselves. (A point that Scott Adams also makes in his book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life.) Another way of saying it is to focus on the process (the system) rather than the goal (the outcome). Here are some of his examples.

• If you're a coach, your goal is to win a championship. Your system is what your team does at practice each day.
• If you're a writer, your goal is to write a book. Your system is the writing schedule that you follow each week.
• If you're a runner, your goal is to run a marathon. Your system is your training schedule for the month.
• If you're an entrepreneur, your goal is to build a million dollar business. Your system is your sales and marketing process. 

Clear goes on to explain the reasons why setting up a system works better than focusing strictly on goals. Rather than repeating them, here is the link.

Continual Improvement Journaling

A couple years ago I read a tennis book that recommended using a journal to rate yourself after each match on how much incremental improvement you made while playing. (Unfortunately I don't remember the book.) It suggested rating yourself on a scale of 1 for low to 5 for high in how much incremental improvement you made in the areas of technique, tactics, mental/emotional, and adjustments. It also asks what you did well and what you could improve. The idea behind this is that we usually don’t drastically improve our games. It’s more a process of continual improvement, often with the quality of our play declining a bit because we’re trying to change things. (This is a common occurrence when people take lessons.)

After doing this for about two years I can say that keeping this journal has been helpful. For one thing, I’ve noticed trends that help me know what to work on, such as I’m not tossing the ball forward enough when serving or I’m hitting overheads long. It’s also been helpful seeing progress as my self-ratings in the categories have increased over time. It probably sounds like bragging but I have to think more about what needs to be improved because I’m making fewer errors or clusters of mistakes in one area.

I think this diary could be used to evaluate how we perform in other areas of our life. Obviously the categories we would use to rate ourselves would be different but the general concept would be the same: the level of incremental improvement. For instance, my job involved making ten or more stewardship presentations a year to customers. (I used the past tense because I’m retired.) If I were to use this self-rating method I would have evaluated how much my technique improved (pacing, variation of my voice, etc.) as well as the design of my slides (layout, simplicity, clarity, etc.) and so on.