The Marginal Gains instigate the participants to look for quick wins, the little things that could easily be done, adding up to great improvements. It is a retrospective activity for identifying and framing intentions, target outcomes and success criteria.

“It’s very difficult to improve 1 thing by 100%. It’s much easier to improve 100 things by 1% for the same effect.” This is the 100 things by 1% improvement idea by Dave Brailsford.

Running the activity:

  1. Share the 100 things by 1% improvement idea, and explain the intention for this activity:
    “We are here today to think differently. We are interested in talking about all the little things which might help us improving”.
  2. Define what you mean by quick wins
    “A quick win is something that could be implementable in a couple of hours, with very little cost.”
  3. Ask everyone to individually brainstorm on quick win for process improvements, writing each idea on a post-it
  4. Collect all post-its and place on a board for further discussions (filtering activity).

This activity was shared by Steve Wells. It is inspired on the philosophy of Dave Brailsford, head of Team Sky. Steve also shared that this activity worked really well with the effort and pain filtering activity.

Remote-team advice: This activity works well for remote teams. Use a remote board of your choice.

Start Now