One of the best meals I’ve ever had was from a little place along the Metolius River in Camp Sherman, Oregon. The Kokanee Cafe (now closed) was referred to me by a coaching friend and sometime in the last ’00’s, my wife and I decided to have a date night there. Something that took me by surprise was that to say the menu had only five entrees on it, and none of the options were ones that I was comfortable with. Fortunately, the lack of options forced me out of my comfort zone and I had one of the best meals I’ve ever experienced.
For me, there were a few “learnings” that came from Kokanee Cafe’s menu. With limited options, the chef at the Kokanee had determined what they were going to be great at and they decided that the Kokanee wouldn’t be for everyone. It also forced me out of my comfort zone to experience something that I wouldn’t have chosen for myself.
Since that time I’ve found a few other restaurants that have even fewer options than the Kokanee. In what is known as the Oregon Outback, the Cowboy Dinner Tree serves two options: steak or chicken. “Steak” being a 26-30 oz. top sirloin steak and “chicken” is an entire whole roasted chicken. In Texas I was able to visit Joe T. Garcia’s where the menu is limited to fajitas or enchiladas and then Babe’s which is limited to chicken fried steak or fried chicken.
The opposite of this principal in the culinary world is the menu of the Cheesecake Factory. While you may be able to get anything that you want, everything from pasta to burgers to seafood to shepard’s pie to tuna poke, nothing on the menu will be the best you’ve ever had. Former NFL General Manager and author of the book Gridiron Genius, Michael Lombardi is fond of using the Cheesecake Factory’s menu as a metaphor for ineffective NFL offenses that do not demonstrate any coherent philosophy or approach to offensive football.
This concept of focusing on a core group of tasks, skills, customers, etc. has a number of different names. The Pareto Principle, the 80/20 rule or the Law of the Vital Few all espouse the idea that 80% of your production comes from only 20% of what you do.
In his 2001 book, Good to Great, Jim Collins talks about General Electric CEO, Jack Welch’s decision to review everything that GE did at the time and cut every division where it was determined they couldn’t be #1 or 2 in the industry.
In the book Practice Perfect the authors share some insightful conclusions not only on the 80/20’s application to sports but to learning in general. As a part of their research into teaching, Doug Lemov and his team not only urge teachers/coaches to identify and focus on the 20 percent, but to do so to the point of mastery.
One of the most counterintuitive but valuable things we’ve realised about practice is the value of practicing something increases once you’ve mastered it. Most people say, when participants get to proficiency, “Good, they know how to do that. Now let’s move on.” But if you are practicing one of the most important skills–one of the 20 percent of skills that drive the 80 percent of results–don’t stop when your participants “know how to do it.” Your goal with these 20 percent skills is excellence, not mere proficiency. Keep going so what you develop is automaticity, fluidity, and even, as we’ll discuss later, creativity. Being great at the most important things is more important than being good at more things that are merely useful.
Practice Perect by Doug Lemov
For those who are searching for how to identify their 20 percent, reviewing data may provide the needed insight for you to drill down what is really important for success in your discipline. This may include using statistical data to narrow what skills are needed to be mastered in order to improve performance in a meaningful way. This could also be data that is gathered through surveys and questionnaires from coaches, athletes, parents, etc. One of my favorite ways to gather feedback from athletes and coaches is through a simple “start/stop/continue” process where we ask participants what we need to start doing, stop doing and continue doing in order to take the next step with our program.
Another strategy would be to find experts in your area of focus and find out what they think is most important in success in your specific sport or activity. Aggregating their answers will provide an insightful and broad based collection of ideas and perspectives that you can draw from to inform your decisions moving forward.
Lemov and company make the point that you 20 percent will change over time. They site the example of an organization that used data to revise how they trained new teachers. Through data collection they realized that spending most of their early work with teachers in effective classroom management was vital in a teacher’s success in particular during the first two months in the classroom. However, once teachers have progressed beyond that point, a new 20 percent can be identified and pursued.
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