Introduction

• Incrementalism is truly awesome and despite the relatively significant press coverage it has received in recent years, too few people really understand it or know how to harness the power of it.
• What is Incrementalism? Wikipedia defines it as: ‘a method of working by adding to a project using many small incremental changes instead of a few (extensively planned) large jumps’
• My renewed interest in incrementalism was sparked by listening to an excellent Freakonomics podcast episode; ‘In Praise of Incrementalism’. It reminded me of the importance of it and got me re-evaluating how I apply it in my own life.
• The aim of this piece is to cover the following 3 key items:
  • Explain what has led to the rise of incrementalism in recent years and also how it links to other similar concepts
  • Highlight and discuss the advantages to optimising incrementalism in your life
  • Show a comparison between incrementalism and ‘big-bang progress’, and why incrementalism often doesn’t get as much press and focus as it should

 

Recent History of Incrementalism  

• The power and magnitude of incrementalism has probably been made most famous in recent years by the ‘marginal gains’ methodology implemented by Dave Brailsford at Team GB’s cycling team. Brailsford’s fundamental view was that there is a “1 percent margin for improvement in everything you do.” If you can make a 1% improvement in everything then the sum of your improvement will be massive.
• Incrementalism or marginal gains methodology are linked to, and often associated with, behavioural economics and the ‘nudge theory’. The key concept behind nudge theory being that if you can nudge people to make a small, potentially insignificant, behavioural change it can have great positive knock-on impacts. I have used incrementalism and nudge theory in a recent blog on ‘Getting up in the Morning’ so if you are looking for an example of this in reality check it out here:  http://jablifestyle.net/2016/11/06/getting-up-each-morning/.
• That is the theory, background and context in which I write this piece. My personal view is that at a macro-level society is too focused on finding and succeeding in the big changes and that we often fail to understand and appreciate the potential effect of making many small gains. If you can make a 1% improvement in fifteen different aspects of something you do it’ll be a lot easier than identifying and implementing a 15% one off change or improvement. In the next section I want to talk about the key advantages of adopting an incremental mindset and talk more about the potential too many leave on the table.

 

Advantages & Key Awareness

• As we’ve already covered what incrementalism is and why it’s provenance has grown in recent years, especially in sport, the next stage of this post will focus on the advantages. I personally see all the associated advantages falling into 4 broad categories:
  • It works – If you aren’t convinced by the incrementalism argument then think about the reverse, marginal losses. Marginal losses explain why people wake up in the their thirties 50lbs overweight and have many have the early signs of type 2 diabetes. It didn’t happen over-night, it happened because they got into bad habits and choose the pub over the gym a few times a month for the last 10 years, and the same approach with simple carbs and sugar over saturated fat and complex carbs. Exactly the same is true for marginal gains or incrementalism, if you set good habits and knock things off 1% at a time, the benefits you’ll see in a number of months or years will be massive.
  • It’s simple to implement – Human nature makes it extremely easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate how important daily tinkering is. Almost every thing you do – bad or good – comes as a result of lots of small decisions over a long period of time. Never forget that or how easy changing things at a micro level can be.
  • It’s Flexible – Incrementalism co-exists with the current mega craze within Silicon Valley of ‘fail fast’. Incrementalism, with it’s focus on the 1%, allows you to test things out, undertake trial and error to see if it works. If it does work then great, you’ve got improvement, if it doesn’t there isn’t a significant sunk cost, only a little effort is wasted. And the last six words of that sentence are key, incrementalism says to break the large into the small, as small as possible and then ‘fail fast’ on an individual component.
  • It provides easy motivation – When I was a swimmer in my early teens if my coach asked me to knock 8-10% of my 200m backstroke personal best in a month, I’d laugh at them and say it wasn’t possible. If they asked me to knock off 2% a week, I’d probably accept the challenge. The human brain is excellent at creating barriers but can easily be tricked if you fame the ask differently. Incrementalism is great at providing motivation, if all I have to do is run an extra 200m each week then I can motivate myself easily, 2 months later I’m running an extra 1.6km!
• The advantages are clear, incrementalism works, is easy to implement, is flexible and makes motivation easy. However there are a couple of things you need to consider and be conscious of before you run off to add incrementalism into every facet of your life.
  • Incrementalism doesn’t work if you have the fundamentals wrong – If you don’t know how to ride a bike trying to use incrementalism won’t work, you need to have a base understanding of how to do something, and a base understanding of the areas you need to improve in before you can apply incrementalism.
  • Incrementalism doesn’t account for significant change – If you are a professional athlete and there is a significant change in the rules governing your sport applying incrementalism is unlikely to be the best method to adopt quickly. Sometimes big-bang changes are required, but these are often exceptions and incrementalism is the norm.
  • Incrementalism gets harder – Finding the ‘low hanging fruit’ or small areas you can improve a little is easy, but once they’ve all been picked it becomes much harder to keep the gains up. That doesn’t mean you should stop, it just means you need work harder and not be disappointed if your rapid improve slows as time goes on.

 

Incrementalism Vs Big Bang Success

• As we’ve seen above incrementalism works and big bang changes or success are the exception rather than the rule, so why then do big bang successes/changes always seen to take the headlines and steal the show?
  • Incrementalism is boring – and so it doesn’t grab the headlines. Being told the best way to lose weight and keep it off is to do so slowly, 1-2 lbs a week, isn’t going to sell you millions of copies of your book. The same is true in business, investing, sport, almost every facet of life, people want to see and find out about the miracle, the outlier, or more likely the fraud.
  • Incrementalism is almost too easy to be true – If you are told that all someone did was work a bit harder and focus on micro-improvements of all facets of their discipline most people then ask, ‘no, but what’s the real secret’. To be in the 0.00001% (the world’s top 20) in anything requires additional factors, technical coaching, genes, being born in the right climate even (marathon runners) but for the vast majority having the motivation, dedicated and will to carry on and apply an incremental methodology is all that is required to become very good.
  • Incrementalism is built into big bang success – As Eddie Cantor (American comedian) famously said ‘It takes 20 years to make an overnight success’. Humans by nature have a short-term memory, they tend to focus on the last thing that happened and see that as the singular or main cause, when in reality it is just one more building block.

 

Conclusion 

• Incrementalism is the ugly duckling of the motivation and success world, yet in my view it is the most important. Whilst examples of outstanding work focused around incrementalism, such as Brailsford’s adoption at Team GB cycling, give incrementalism some occasional limelight it remains under analysed and adopted.
• The advantages of incrementalism are clear, incrementalism works, is easy to implement, is flexible and makes motivation easy. Therefore be inspired and take heart from the ‘big bang successes’ in the media but don’t wait to become one yourself.
• Break down the thing you want to become great at into it’s smallest number of components and then identify how you can improve each of them by 1%, keep doing this day in day out and you’ll see significant returns relatively quickly.

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