Engineering a Win

On March 14 2012, I received an article from Douglas Ryder, the Team Principal for the MTN Qhubeka cycling team. It was entitled "Engineering an Argus Win", and as I read it, it was almost as if I was reading a fast-paced business plan of sorts.

Reinardt Janse van Rensburg claiming his maiden Argus victory in 2012  

I asked Doug whether I could use his article as the basis for a blog post, because as I have observed before, there seem to be significant parallels between performance on the sports field and performance in business.

Thank you for permission to use your article as a base Doug.

Doug opens:

For the country’s pro cyclists, [the Argus] is a race calendar highlight and many weeks of hard work, preparation and strategising go into the planning for the race. For Team MTN-Qhubeka, this year’s hard work paid off. Yet the riders will tell you that despite all the careful preparation and training, the win came down to how the situation unfolded on the day and how the racers handled it at the time. Winning a race is a magical combination of planning, spur-of-the-moment decisions on the day, and good fortune.

In business:

The highlight could be acquiring a new B2B customer, entering a new market, launching a new product, or even installing a new IT system. Yet the drivers of success are the same - it takes many months of hard work for the team, of planning, of determining the dependencies and inter-dependencies, of negotiating with a diverse group of stakeholders including customers, staff, service providers and even shareholders. And yet in spite of all the preparation, so many things can still go wrong, things that on any other day may have produced an unequivocal win, but that on other days leave you at a loss. 

Preparation and Strategy
Doug, Team Captain Arran Brown, and race winner Reainardt Janse van Rensburg continue:
Preparation is huge. We ride together often as a team, we practice lead-outs so that in the race conditions we are ready. The most important part in terms of preparation is seeing the finish beforehand.
We look at absolutely every aspect. We look at the wind direction and the gradients of the climbs. We test different wheels. The sprinters will go to the finish line and look at whether it will be a headwind or tailwind finish. They also experiment with different gear ratios – a heavier gear for a tailwind finish or a lighter gear for a headwind finish.
The day before the race, the team mechanic spends hours examining the bikes and ensuring that the finest details are taken care of. Each teammate racing has a specific role to fill and sticks to that role in the race, unless the plan needs to change.
On the day though, not everything will always go according to plan.


In business:
Preparation is huge. It begins with spending lots of quality time with your team to get to know them, their strengths and their weaknesses, and how the different members of the team can support each other, whether in Finance, Risk, Compliance, HR, IT, Operations or Marketing. Much quality time is spent together while in the process of building a shared goal, a joint vision, as well as in the supporting process of building a commonly understood roadmap for getting there! People first!
Every aspect is considered. Once the goal and purpose are explicit and have a shared meaning, next is to understand the business model (how to make money). This involves identifying and understanding the target market, building products in conjunction with the target market and creating channels to get the product to the market. However, none of this happens very well if you don't have a suitable operating model (how the business operates). This requires processes to be put in place, at which point IT becomes involved (from an automation perspective at this point but also from an innovation perspective) and people become charged with various roles in the process, some requiring a segregation of duties. Given all this, there needs to be a corresponding capital and expenditure budget, as well as a suitable information strategy, with the latter being very important in the information and knowledge economy. Oh, and don't forget that all this need to comply with the laws of the geography you are doing business in.
The complexity of all the above is that it seldom operates from a clean sheet perspective, and to a large degree, you often need to make do with what you have for extended periods, slowly making changes as each financial cycle ticks by, and hopefully in some type of synchronicity with all the other parts of the business already operating at their various schedules.


Facing the Unexpected
Team Captain Arran Brown continues:
Brown notes that the race suits sprinters. As such, the team plan was to ride for a sprint and support Brown, making sure that he was in any breakaway that happened. In the final 400m, however, the careful plans unravelled. Brown was planning to sprint off of Van Niekerk’s wheel, but the two unfortunately touched wheels, which caused Brown to swerve into the pavement, nearly crashing. Van Rensburg, looking back, saw what had happened and carried on pushing, managing to take the win for the team. Brown quickly recovered, clipped his foot back in and continued to sprint from about 10th place, managing to claim a fourth place finish despite the incident. 
We spend weeks strategising and planning for the race to be perfect and in the last 300m of a 110km race things change. 


In business:
There are many different types of market. Some depend on the right infrastructure being in place (sometimes very expensive infrastructure), some depend on agility, and some depend on captured markets, amongst others. The first note is that it can be difficult competing in one type of market when you're not geared for it at all, or if you're still in the process of gearing up or even in the process of regearing.
Given this, one of the aspects of Doug's article that is of particular interest is that of operational options. Doug has more than one sprinter in his team for a race suiting sprinters, and in this case, although it went pear-shaped for the captain, a sprinter, there was another eminently capable sprinter in the field to bring the win home when it went wrong. In the same way, I believe that the more volatile the markets, the more the requirement for multiple options in business, sometimes taking the form not necessarily of multiple strategies, but of team cross-skilling and succession planning. This falls into the domain of Enterprise Risk Management, where core risks putting the sustainability of the enterprise in jeopardy are considered and mitigating actions are planned for them.

Ultimately, all the planning in the world is not necessarily enough to ensure a win. Sometimes the win depends more on the ingenuity of your people, coupled with a good dose of luck at the right time, rather than on necessarily reaping the labours of your strategic planning process to plan.

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Thanks for an inspiring article Doug, and well done MTN Qhubeka. Doug's original article is here.You can also follow Doug Ryder at @dougryd and Team MTN Qhubeka at @TeamMTNQhubeka