When I have done sports coaching, no matter what the standard I have been keen to draw attention to ‘one percenters’, all the potentially trivial little things you can do in a game to make yourself a better player but that don’t always pay off. I’ve found that really reaching out to stop a centre pass in netball for example will not interrupt the pass the vast majority of the time, but in every game it will get a few scrapes of the ball sending it off kilter, and outright stop it at least once. There is also the possibility it reduces the best trajectory of the ball to the opposing Goal Attack or Wing Attack which could have a butterfly effect of sorts.
This might sound like I’m trying to argue a whole game can be won with a centre pass, but really the mass accumulation of all these little one percenters can and does affect outcomes. Each player putting in that maximum effort to block, cover a player by running, standing right up to the line for a throw in etc will add up over a play, a quarter, a game, a season and a career.
My impetus for writing this post had nothing to do with netball or sport. I was depositing a cheque at my bank and I discovered that you no longer need envelopes to deposit cheques. You just slip it in the opening, it scans the cheque(s) (no need to type anything in or add amounts), approve the transaction and it’s all done.
It got me thinking about all this as a ‘one percenter’. Imagine all the cost savings this bank will make from deposit envelopes at each atm in Australia, each day, over the next decade or more.
To apply the same ‘butterfly effect’, many other ‘one percenters’ could arise from this efficiency;
- less customer time spent at an atm
- less waiting time for other customers
- reduced effort from customers
- less potential error
- less handling time of envelopes
- less wastage of paper
- lower costs from not needing envelopes
I’m sure there are others. I would ask, what are the one percenters in your business? A follow up call to a client? A recycling bin? Asking wrong number callers where they got your number from so you can remove the error?
In teaching, what are the one percenters? Putting the lesson objectives on the board for every lesson? Making eye contact with every student while speaking? Interacting with every student, every lesson, at least once? (I did this and it saved me the hassle of five wrong number calls a day! :P)
If you find enough one percenters, you’ll soon have a new whole.