 Hey, Jonathan from AJ & Smart here. And in this video, I want to show you that if you want to increase your team's productivity that you do not need to change everything at once. In fact, that might be a bad thing to do. What you want to focus on is the tiny incremental changes. Before we jump into this video, I have a question for you. What are your productivity hacks? If you work in a team, what are your team productivity hacks? If you work alone, what are the things that you do to improve your productivity overall? We want to know, because we want to research them because we're obsessed with this topic. All right, let's jump back into it. What is productivity in a nutshell? It's basically just getting stuff done efficiently. I mean, that's just kind of a straight up kind of definition of it. There's another thing that's often mixed up with productivity and it's effectivity and effectivity is doing the right things. So we're not really going to focus on effectivity today because doing the right things is actually a lot harder than just doing stuff efficiently and doing more things with less time. But let's just have a look at the first thing, productivity. So when a company decides to tackle productivity and when they want to increase productivity, they often go for really big overhauls of the systems that they have. They try bringing in agile if they were waterfall. They try bringing in design thinking if they weren't using something like this before. They often try these massive overhauls without just trying some small fixes first. But often it's the small 1% changes to a system that help make it more productive and the larger, big projects that like the 80% projects often don't even work or they take so long that you can't even measure them. There's a great quote from James Clear and it says, humans tend to overestimate the importance of one defining moment. So you know, sending the team to a conference or doing a big workshop or doing some crazy innovation thing. So that's the one big defining moment. I just want an excuse to write on this board, by the way. So that's the one big defining moment. They tend to underestimate the value of small improvements on daily basis. So rather than this, you know, everyone seems to say, okay, this is the right way to go. But these tiny incremental changes, you know, that's just not as exciting. It's boring. So those things, we're not going to focus on those. We're going to focus on constantly doing big changes. We're going to do this process. We're going to do this process. We're going to do that process. But what I've seen as one of the best ways to continually improve the productivity of a team is really these tiny incremental changes. So one great example of this 1% marginal gains approach working well is, well, actually, let me get my laptop because I can't really, I need to read something for my laptop two seconds. Oh, here it is. All right. So what I'm looking at here is the is an excerpt from the great book by James Clear, who I just quoted. And this is the book called Atomic Habits. Atomic Habits. What even is that? Atomic Habits. The excerpt from the book is about a coach called Pat Riley, who took over a team called the LA Lakers, who were a struggling basketball team in the US. And he spent months just focusing on marginal gains, slight increases in speed, slight increases and improvements in passing ability, and trying to find what the absolute baseline for his players were on their normal days, not on their best days, and trying to slightly improve that over time, rather than tearing everything apart and coming up with new strategies and bringing in new players and focusing on individual superstars. Pat Riley called this incremental gains approach, the CBE program, the career best effort program. Eight months after he took over, the team were the NBA champions. This really, really focused approach on tiny, tiny incremental improvements, managed to over time bring the team from the bottom to the top, whereas the approach that was happening before on the team was these, ah, let's try this. Ah, let's try this. Let's try this without finding a baseline to work from. All right, I'm going to get this laptop out of my hand again. But I think if I clap it will fall horribly. Let's see what happens. You know what? We should just leave this of you taking it. Let's leave it in. The goal in the beginning when you're trying to improve a team's productivity is just to try to get a habit. Try to start these small incremental steps. Eventually, there'll be enough confidence and enough routine to try bigger things. This is the reason why, for example, we do not recommend some of our clients to go straight for a big process like the design sprint right in the beginning, because the design sprint can sometimes be one of these larger initiatives. So sometimes it's better for us to say, look, we're going to do a small training here. We're going to show you how to run retrospectives. We're going to show you how to run these smaller workshops. And when your team is used to this rhythm, then we can go and layer on some of the bigger things when you have a better baseline. So really to, you know, once your team starts getting momentum and starts getting the momentum for improving their system, that's the time where you can start layering on other skills and layering on other things. And then the team is going to be more effective. You know, when you bring them to, when you bring them to a conference, when they're at this level, and then they get this massive boost because of the conference, you know, it's going to go back down again. And the only way to give them another boost is by doing a retreat or a conference or a talk or something inspirational. And it's just this constant need to bump it up and down, bump it up and down. And they keep going back down to their baseline. Whereas if you're controlling the baseline and slowly moving it up, then when you do things like workshops or conferences or inspirational things, they're adding it to their baseline and continuing to improve, continuing to share knowledge, it's just a better way to operate a team. The point here, if I didn't make it clear, the focus when improving productivity in a team should be on incremental gains, incremental improvements, rather than these big ticket massive things that you're doing for the team, massive overhauls, you know, getting rid of everyone, trying massive new system overhauls, constantly setting up your new vision and values, all of this stuff that's really, really big. When really the things that might improve it are these small, tiny, marginal gains. Let me show you the power of tiny, marginal gains. When we compare a company that focuses on marginal gains and a company that doesn't focus on marginal gains, I'm stealing this graph from James Clear again. So thank you, James, you're a legend. I'm going to draw it on here though, so you can see it nice and big. This could be the thumbnail. Okay, let's take a look at a company that does 1% better every day over the span of a year. First, let's take our baseline. This is where the team is today. And now let's just imagine they do not get any better or get any worse. This doesn't usually happen. It doesn't usually stay straight, but let's just actually take it as an example. So here's the baseline. Should have drawn the baseline higher up in the graph. Doesn't matter. This paper is too expensive. I'm not redoing it. Okay, so now let's take a look at a company that, and let's do this in a blue marker. Let's look at a company that does over the space of a year. This is one year. This is improvement. One year, a company that changes 1% every day looks something like this. Okay, that's what a team productivity level looks like over a year if you're just doing 1% changes every day, every week, however you want to look at it. Here, the baseline is a team that this kind of mythical team that does nothing, but somehow stays the same. But now let's take a look at a realistic case of a team that does 1% less efficient, like is 1% less efficient every day and gets worse every day, which is actually what happens if you don't fix problems within a team. Now, because I've drawn this graph slightly proportion wrong, I'm going to go a little bit wild and break the rules. This is what happens when a team gets worse. Now imagine this is your competitor's team. They're constantly iterating constantly, like at AJ and Smart. Our design team is constantly iterating the whole time, always fixing small issues, always doing tiny little things to improve our processes. Whereas maybe one of our competitors doesn't do anything about it and they're constantly trying different things, but overall getting less and less efficient. And this is a graph of what a lot of companies look like over time. They build up a lot of cruft, they build up a lot of messiness and the productivity levels go down. And this is what it looks like to have marginal, tiny gains versus a company that doesn't do that and tries the more messy approach. It is boring to do these marginal gains, but it is extremely effective. I think this could be the thumbnail like me like this. Hopefully that was a good way for you to see what marginal gains can achieve, what doing tiny little steps that change a tiny bit of the team's productivity every week, every month, maybe even every day, what kind of effect that can have over time versus not doing anything or versus doing these massive overhauls every year. I would recommend reading the book Atomic Habits if you want to go deeper into this topic. And I would definitely recommend you checking out our workshops like Lightning Decision Jam or some of our other workshop videos on our YouTube channel if you want to learn more. If you liked this video, make sure you give it a like, give it a comment down below. Let us know your thoughts on productivity. If you liked it and want to go deeper, you can check out the article in the description below on workshopper.com. Workshopper.com is a great place to learn about productivity tactics and workshops. You can also check out our LinkedIn page where we'll be going deeper into this topic all week. And you can also come back here every Tuesday where we always have a new video. So see you next time. Let's start really quickly with what exactly productivity actually is. Now this is the biggest flip chart in the world. I thought you might want to know that. And actually the answer to all of the questions is that this increases productivity. Okay, I did not do a good job of writing this. Okay, there's a great quote from James Clear. And it says, Callum, can you read the quote for me? So the quote from James Clear is, Productivity is often thought as big changes to end- Wait. Okay, the problem is productivity that help make a system more effective. No, more productive. You got me. Hey. And with this, they were able to, they were able to win something. Okay. So the LA Lakers? Okay. 1% better every year. Just every year. Okay. No, every day.