The power of co-operation (and cycling)

I have a confession to make. I love cycling. I mean, I LOVE it. Watching men in lycra struggling up a mountainside or fighting it out in a mad bunch sprint just floats my boat. Yesterday Mark Cavendish won his 6th stage of this year’s Tour de France, an utterly amazing achievement.

I have a confession to make. I love cycling. I mean, I LOVE it. Watching men in lycra struggling up a mountainside or fighting it out in a mad bunch sprint just floats my boat. Yesterday Mark Cavendish won his 6^th stage of this year’s Tour de France, an utterly amazing achievement.

Now, ‘Cav’ is undoubtedly supremely talented. But he would be the first to admit that a lot of his success has come on the back of a well-drilled and highly talented lead-out team.

For those of you not au fait with cycling, the lead-out team guide the sprinter to the front of the race giving him the aerodynamic advantage of a slipstream. They also give him the simple task of ‘following a wheel’, so that he can just concentrate on unleashing his sprint, rather than be distracted by the chaos around him. Cavendish’s team do this fantastically well.

Here’s a very crunchy segue. Matthew Taylor blogged today about a talk by Dan Pink where he (Pink) argues for the idea that crude incentives damage performance in completing complex tasks.  MT says:

‘One of the best pieces of evidence for this claim comes from the famous candle problem. In this exercise subjects are shown a picture of a table next to a wall. On the table is a candle, a book of matches and some drawing pins in a box. The task is to attach the candle to the wall over the table, light it, but not let it drip wax on the table.

On average it takes people about ten minutes to identify the solution. This is to take the drawing pins out of the box, pin the box to the wall, then stand the candle on the box so the wax drips on to it rather than the table. This requires the subjects to make the lateral leap of seeing that the box holding the pins is not just a receptacle for another object but an object in itself.

In this test those who are offered a cash prize for completion perform less well than those who are simply asked to solve it as quickly as they can. Fascinatingly, if the test is made easier - by taking the pins out of the box so it can be seen from the start as an object in play - then those offered incentives perform better than those not.’

I have blogged before about incentives, arguing that we do not draw on the full range in motivating people to get the job done. In some instances, competitive financial incentives are out of place and what is wanted is a cooperative space in which people feel able to explore possibilities and are not afraid to make mistakes.

Pink’s thesis supports my point. Although the candle problem is approached by an individual, one can easily imagine that approaches to certain kinds of complex problems would be solved even faster if no crude incentives were offered, but a spirit of cooperative inquiry adopted. Think of open-source software or how Nasa work or how great comedy shows and dramas are written by teams of writers.

And that brings me back to Cavendish’s team: they work together for one another tirelessly. And what they do best is adjust to complicated and fast-changing race conditions on the hoof. And in doing that the way they do, they've whipped every other team trying for the sprint – quite comprehensively. This shows that  camaraderie and cooperation are for winners too!