Small Improvements Drive Great Results

Every organization, company, or group of any kind has a culture that is unique only to it. No other group is or will ever be exactly like it. This culture is lived by the organization and may have similarities to other groups but may be vastly different in other ways. This culture grows over time and evolves in ways that are both predictable and unpredictable, seen and unseen, positive and negative, engrained and fleeting, beneficial to the organization and detrimental to it. Every day, each member of the organization constantly moves the culture in positive or negative ways with every decision, every task, and every comment that they make. Sometimes they oscillate across the imaginary equator, moving it in both directions with competing events.

For many years I taught Junior Achievement finance classes in elementary schools, including at the schools where my children attended. One example I used in showing the power of consistency is asking them if they would rather have $1 million right now or alternatively, have 1 penny that is doubled every day for a month. Most often, they would choose the $1 million. After 10 days of doubling, the penny reaches only $5. After 20 days of doubling, the amount is still much lower than $1 million, hitting only $5 thousand. But something magical happens as the days continue and the amount compounds on itself in a consistent and repeatable way, ultimately producing a balance of $10.7 million in only 31 days.

Just as individuals are built by millions of unique experiences and decisions, so are organizations. How do we shape these experiences and decisions so that our company is constantly moving in a positive direction, incrementally getting better and stronger, compounding that effort over months and years? I believe it comes down to each simple decision, comment, or effort made by each employee or member of that organization. It is not a matter of being positive more often than negative, because every choice contributes to change in differing degrees. A single negative comment could undermine days of positive comments. A big push on a project can outweigh a slow start. Focusing on training can outweigh previous misunderstanding and mistakes. To make a positive difference, we need to be consistent and repeatable.

To make a positive difference, we need to be consistent and repeatable.

Organizations are the same as people. Every consistent, repeatable, positive result propels us forward into “culture compounding.” That is our goal at Med One and the reason we have twelve guiding principles that form the acronym COURAGEOUSLY. We constantly and “COURAGEOUSLY” seek to be better and to build an ever-increasing positive culture and increase performance.

A historic example of producing small constant positive changes to drive big results came from the British Cycling Team. In summary, between 1908 and 2003, the British Cycling team had won only a single gold medal at the Olympic Games and had not won a single Tour De France in 110 years. The team hired a performance director named Dave Brailsford that pushed the team to increase performance by 1% in each area of cycling. He believed the “aggregation of marginal gains” he projected would be significant when added together. Each aspect of their program was analyzed and pushed to improve 1% at a time. The end result was the U.K. winning eight of the fourteen cycling medals at the 2008 Olympics. Four years later in the 2012 London Olympics, the team set nine Olympic records and seven world records. The U.K. also won six of the seven Tour de France races from 2012 to 2018.

Our Goal at Med One should be the same: find areas where we can make a small but repeatable difference, then find ways to make constant, even if small, improvements. Our outcome will be similarly outstanding.