Many small improvements across every component are held to compound into a decisive advantage.
Brailsford's account attributed British Cycling's success to hundreds of one-percent improvements, from pillow choice to hand-washing. The programme also received a large increase in lottery funding and recruited exceptionally. The doctrine has been repeated in business almost entirely on the strength of the sporting result.
In practice
- A team that improves fourteen things by 1% has made a real difference or none, and the account cannot tell you which.
- A firm that copies the method without the budget that accompanied it has copied the visible half.
- Possible explanations
- The explanation offered is compounding across components: many one-percent improvements multiply into a decisive margin, provided each is real and retained.
- In its favour
- Attention to overlooked components is genuinely useful, and the approach produced measurable improvements in equipment, recovery and illness rates at British Cycling.
- Against it
- It is a framing rather than a measured finding: the same results are equally consistent with a large funding increase, talent and the marginal-gains programme together, and the arithmetic assumes gains are independent and additive, which they usually are not.
- Standing
- A framing rather than a measured finding. British Cycling's results are consistent with it and equally consistent with funding, talent and coaching, and the doctrine has since been applied far beyond any evidence for it.
- Subject
- Sport & Performance
- Essay
- The best-measured contests there are