500 Words a Week - Dyson
Sir James Dyson took 5127 attempts at creating the first dyson vacuum cleaner. That meant 5126 failures. Dyson viewed these failures as progress, one step nearer the final product as he learned from each failure. Dyson was also meticulous in this process, changing just one aspect for every attempt, so he could truly isolate and conclude whether something worked or not.
We can learn many things from this process. As people, how many times do we get deterred by failure. Dyson shows us how we must embrace it and learn from it. As coaches, how many times do we completely change every aspect of the training programme or add in several new components, if our athletes achieve improvements we cannot truly isolate which new aspect of the programme may have been beneficial to them. Paying more attention to what we are changing and the results we are having will enable us to keep driving towards a more productive system.
Dyson was told that will never work in the beginning, similar to how Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings at Netflix were also told that will never work. A phrase I picked up from Bob Iger’s book sums this up nicely: “innovate or die”. Dyson and Netflix quickly overtook and crushed their competitors. As coaches we must be looking for the best and most efficient ways to keep our athletes healthy and improving. Learning from Dyson, this means consistently tracking and analyzing what we are doing well and what not. When striving for the perfect programme, it’s important to note that this might be brought about by trying to remove the debris blocking the boat from going faster. “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
I’m currently working my way through “Zen and the art of motor cycle maintenance” which brings up some interesting points on the scientific method, that I also believe apply to our everyday coaching.
“Everything gets written down, formally, so that you know at all times where you are, where you’ve been, where you’re going and where you want to get”.
This is something I am trying to get better at. Taking time to continually plan and write out what I am hoping to do with my athletes, and then revisiting it and updating what I actually did and how I believed it went.
Scott Kuehn had a wonderful recent post about building a coaching portfolio, which I believe links with continually keeping track and updating what you are doing. This was mainly targeted towards job applications. However, to me this seems like an amazing process regardless of going for a job or not, so it’s something I will be looking to create for myself. We should include where we went wrong or mistakes we have made.
To conclude, some food for thought from “Zen and the art of motor cycle maintenance”:
“The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t”.
“If you get careless or go romanticizing scientific information, giving it a flourish here and there, Nature will soon make a complete fool out of you”.
How often within S&C are we guilty of romanticizing scientific information, and as the quote goes “giving it a flourish here and there”. We must be conscious of this, as more often than not, it’s our athletes that will pay the price.
