I signed up for a 140 mile endurance event nearly a year ago. The other day, as I close in on race day, I found myself comparing the work that has gone into preparing for this with the work required to deliver a successful IT project. This is how the preparation for the race has gone:
- You, your coaches, and those training with you all agree on the goals, and their relative priority.
- You build up your capabilities slowly.
- Each week you are given specific and measurable step goals against which to deliver.
- Feedback is instant, and where goals are undershot (or even overshot), an adjustment is made immediately to compensate.
- Everything is documented.
- Part of the work out is effort based, but part is knowledge / skills based, so that subsequent effort delivers ever more benefit.
- The mood is one of nurturing and encouragement.
- There is a cadence of builds and recuperation across the weeks and months, to aid consolidation of the work to date.
- Dialogue and openness are constant.
- If you don’t do your workouts, the coaches don’t step in and do them for you.
- There is both a long term aspect and a short term aspect to the work. The two aspects dovetail.
- You have the opportunity to find ways of working that are best for you, but within an established set of common guidelines.
- Your focus is absolute, and every decision can be boiled down to one question: “what is more likely to bring success?”
- You are ready weeks before the main event.
- The final weeks are gentle affairs with more sleep, and greater time in recovery so that you’re in the best shape for demands of the event itself.
There is an element of comparing apples with oranges in this exercise, but there is enough of an overlap to make me wonder why these elements of an approach proven in sport are not embraced more actively in business. Many projects do follow the points mentioned but if any are neglected, I suspect they come from the first 10 in the list. (Then again, 14 and 15 are surely rarer than we’d like.)
