An article in today's Guardian highlights the importance of marginal gains...
"The sports scientist Matt Parker, a key figure in British Cycling's Olympic success in Beijing and London, is to join the Rugby Football Union.... Since 2009 Parker has been head of marginal gains at the cycling team, leading the squad's quest for perfection in areas such as diet, performance analysis and aerodynamics."
Parker is quoted as saying, "We are obsessed with getting the details right; we are relentless in pursuit of it. It's not easy for other federations to do, because of the details involved. It's about everyone being the best they can be – the carer not leaving anything behind, the mechanic testing everything – but it's not just two weeks. It's two months, two years. When you put that in place, your chances of success are higher."
"The sports scientist Matt Parker, a key figure in British Cycling's Olympic success in Beijing and London, is to join the Rugby Football Union.... Since 2009 Parker has been head of marginal gains at the cycling team, leading the squad's quest for perfection in areas such as diet, performance analysis and aerodynamics."
Parker is quoted as saying, "We are obsessed with getting the details right; we are relentless in pursuit of it. It's not easy for other federations to do, because of the details involved. It's about everyone being the best they can be – the carer not leaving anything behind, the mechanic testing everything – but it's not just two weeks. It's two months, two years. When you put that in place, your chances of success are higher."
In the two years before the
London Olympics the Great Britain cycling team brought in numerous
innovations to provide small but significant performance gains that,
when combined, gave an advantage over the opposition.
Sir Chris Hoy describes the approach thus: “It’s finding the smallest areas
that you can make gains in. The British Cycling slogan
is about the accumulation of marginal gains – you’re not looking to
make a 10 per cent gain in one area, you’re looking to make a 0.1 per
cent improvement in 50 areas or 100 areas."
In education, we're not aiming to gain an advantage over the opposition. We are, however, aiming to do the best that we can do, be the best that we can be and constantly improve. We have that opportunity as teachers because we do what we do over and over again. We're in practice every day. By adopting the accumulation of marginal gains as our approach, we can commit to that incremental approach.... to improve what we do and how we do it. There are no magic formulas for outstanding teaching, just good, old-fashioned hard work allied to rigorous and honest reflection and self-analysis. Rather than do what we do and keep on doing it until a magic formula comes along to solve the problem for us, let's seek to improve bit by bit by bit, every day.
Full article
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2012/nov/19/rfu-bradley-wiggins-british-cycling?INTCMP=SRCH
