Cycling, Cycles & Continuous Improvement
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
Kaizen
Kaizen is the Japanese term for ‘changes for the better’, or ‘continuous improvement’.
It’s a business philosophy that was developed in the Japanese automotive industry during the 1960s that focuses on making numerous incremental changes to improve operations, customer satisfaction and business results.
It enabled companies like Toyota to rapidly build a reputation for high quality manufacturing, mechanical reliability and competitive value, that gave them a significant market advantage.
In 1970, Japanese cars only had a 1.4% market share in the U.S.
By 1979 they had surged to 21%, and it kept growing:
It took decades for the other manufacturers to catch up, implement similar processes and be able to compete again.
Whenever continuous improvement is introduced to new sectors they give the people using it a huge advantage.
Marginal Gains
Great Britain was not at all great at cycle racing.
The British cycling team had won a couple of gold medals in the 1908 London Olympics, and a solitary tandem racing gold in 1920.
After that; 72 years of nothing.
Then out of the blue, in the 1998 Barcelona Olympics, Chris Boardman jumped on a science fiction bike and won gold in the track pursuit.
The Lotus 108 was a quantum leap rather than continuous improvement and very quickly bikes like that were banned.
But while the rest of the world went back to the comfort of doing the same things again, British Cycling and their new Performance Director David Brailsford saw an opportunity.
As they couldn’t wholly reinvent the bicycle they decided to focus on improving every other thing they possibly could, calling their version of continuous improvement ‘marginal gains’.
David Brailsford described marginal gains; "The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improved it by 1%, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together.”
They relentlessly improved every element of the bikes, the aerodynamics, the clothing, the food the team ate, the training and the racing strategy.
The team looked everywhere to find 1% improvements, discovering some in unexpected places:
They found that rubbing alcohol on the tyres gave them better grip.
They hired a surgeon to teach everyone how to wash their hands properly to reduce their chances of catching colds.
They discovered which pillow and mattress would provide the best night's sleep for each rider, then they would haul them around to replace the standard ones in every hotel they visited.
& They painted the inside of the maintenance truck white to spot the small specs of dust that could add friction to the performance of the bikes.
And all these 1% improvements added up to a huge advantage.
British Cycling suddenly became the dominant force across the next few Olympics, winning 19 gold medals in the men's events.
At the same time British cyclists won 178 world championships in just ten-years from 2007 to 2017.
Following their track success, the same people set up Team Sky and won 7 Tour de France titles in 8 years, in a race that no British rider or team had won in the previous century!
After 20 years of dominance it was another 20 years before other nations and professional teams began effectively using continuous improvement themselves to catch-up.
“Gentlemen, we will chase perfection, and we will chase it relentlessly, knowing all the while we can never attain it. But along the way, we shall catch excellence.” - Vince Lombardi
Continuous Improvement
Sports like track cycling operate in a kind learning environment.
Kind learning environments offer immediate, accurate, and abundant feedback, in situations with consistent rules.
Most of us operate in wicked learning environments.
Wicked learning environments provide delayed, distorted and limited feedback, in complex situations.
In these situations it’s incredibly difficult to know if the changes we make are resulting in improvements.
So we have to create our own feedback loops.
The business theorist W. Edwards Deming designed one of the best known frameworks for this, which he introduced into Japan as one of the concepts that evolved into Kaizen.
His PDCA Cycle is four stage method used to force continuous improvement into any process:
Plan: Identify an opportunity and plan a change.
Do: Implement the change on a small scale.
Check: Review the test, analyse the results to see if the change results in an actual improvement.
Act: If the change worked, implement it on a wider scale.
It’s not the only cycle in town.
If you want to launch a startup and you are working in extreme uncertainty, then you can speed things up by doing a lot less planning and just cracking on.
In his book The Lean Startup, Eric Ries replaced the PDCA Cycle with his Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop.
Then there’s the OODA Loop - Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.
It was developed by U.S Air Force fighter pilot John Boyd, who realised that in a dogfight (the ultimate wicked environment), the pilot who could cycle through this loop the fastest would win.
But whichever cyclical acronym you use, the key thing is to run small sets of scientific tests on your hypothesis, and ideally run them and learn as quickly as possible.
“To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.” - Winston Churchill.
The Red Queen Effect
These cycles are not pure loops, because you come out on the other side with a performance improvement.
So they looks a little more like this:
Then you keep repeating these cycles, either continuing to refine a process, or launching new ideas.
Continuous improvement is a relentless effort.
And with each loop, and across multiple loops, the advantages add up to great improvements over time.
"It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." - The Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass
The Red Queen Effect is an idea from evolutionary biology, based on this Lewis Carroll quote, that species have to constantly adapt, evolve, and proliferate in order to survive while pitted against ever-evolving opposing species.
Whether it is building cars, racing bikes, or launching a business, if you are not continuously improving, you are falling behind, because your environment and competitors are evolving.
If you can be the first to adopt continuous improvement, your competitors aren't just trying to catch up; they are trying to catch a moving and accelerating target.
If you are the first in your industry, your market, or your career stage to embrace continuous improvement, you can build a lead that makes you impossible to catch.
“The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.” - Eric Ries
