Do Less To Improve

Ten seconds left. Your team is down by one.

You call a timeout and the team comes into the huddle. What do you do?

You have a precious 60 seconds to cover every possible outcome. The real challenge isn’t being the smartest person in the room and detailing everything that could happen.

The challenge is to say as much as the team can remember, and that is usually two things.

What can a coach screaming instructions to a bunch of sweaty, exhausted players teach us about improving our and our team’s performance?

7 plus or minus 2

In 1956, cognitive psychologist George A. Miller published the Magic Number Seven Experiment. What he found is that people in general can hold up to 7 + or – 2 pieces of information in their working memory.

This means that people can remember about 7 names, numbers, or objects before additional information starts to make them forget other pieces of information.

Miller’s findings reveals that humans have a finite capacity for the quantity of information they can process at a given time. This means that too much information will start to degrad their performance.

Kind of like why many people have to turn the music down when parking their car. Too much stimuli imparis their ability to drive.

Get that 4%

To improve you need to do something. Practice makes perfect, or so they say. You don’t want to practice something that is too easy, you get bored. If you practice something that is way to hard you get frustrated and stop.

The sweet spot is 4%.

You want to be practicing skills that are 4% too hard. You get the buzz of seeing improvement but also it is not so difficult that it demoralising and it’s not so boring that you want to stop.

Improving your performance

When searching for improvement from yourself, or your team, you want to be very specific, both in what you are doing and in what you expect to get out of it.

If a team member felt they presentation didn’t go well for a number of overly self-crtical reasons, it would be a challenge for anyone to fix all of the issues simultaneously.

Instead, if you get them to think of the two biggest things they think they could improve upon and have them focus on those. Now they will have less of a mental load so that they can focus in on performing those specific tasks better.

Eventually, you will want to get to the other elements they wanted to improve, but working on everything all at once is going to lead to more frustration rather than improvement.

Continusously working on less things will lead to more improvement over time.