Lessons from the Winter Olympics that can be applied to operational excellence
How the skills and approaches applied in Olympic disciplines translate to operational excellence
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The Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, which are taking place right now, offer a perfect opportunity to look at the basic principles for the success of top athletes and apply them to operational excellence initiatives in your company.
Professional athletes practice repeatedly, over many years, to improve their performance and ultimately prevail over their competitors. Operational excellence initiatives are also about optimizing performance and strengthening competitiveness. The Olympic Games, with an enormous range of different disciplines, can provide insights that can be transferred to your organization.
Olympic disciplines that translate to operational excellence
Ice hockey
In ice hockey, as in many other team sports, a match plan is the basis for success. It describes the strategy for a game and the concrete tactics for the different parts of the team. In ice hockey, practiced combinations are a great advantage; there are well-rehearsed team parts, such as the forwards duo or defensive line, that come together to form a successful team.
Lessons learned: Develop a strategic business model that provides the guidelines for your operating model. Use what-if scenarios to work out your strategy and play through different scenarios. Process management is teamwork. Standardizing processes and work instructions is the basis for high-performance work. Define variants for alternative process handling where necessary.
Alpine disciplines
In alpine disciplines, such as slalom or giant slalom, the course is set anew for each race. The athletes inspect the course shortly before the race and define an individual line and tactics.
Lessons learned: Disruptive change is shaping nearly all industries. Accept the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA) of the world and adapt with the new normal. Use agile methods to continuously adapt your strategy and your way of working. Technologies such as low-code or no-code platforms offer the possibility to quickly automate parts of processes or generate necessary applications.
Freestyle skiing
In freestyle skiing, there are five different disciplines such as slopestyle and halfpipe, where creativity plays a particularly important role.
Lessons learned: Innovation in products, but increasingly also in processes, plays a significant role in achieving competitive advantages. Based on your business model, identify the processes that differentiate you from the competition and build on your strengths and differentiators. Use the experiences from other industries to set your business apart.
Relay competitions
In relay competitions in cross-country skiing and biathlon, the balance within the team is what counts. The overall performance is only as strong as its weakest link.
Lessons learned: Looking at the end-to-end processes, including the role of partners in the supply and distribution networks, it is essential to optimize overall performance. Know and analyze your entire business ecosystem across hierarchies. Develop ‘plan B’ scenarios to deal with the failure of a partner.
Alpine slalom
In all competitions there is a set of rules that must be followed. This is obvious in alpine slalom, where missing a gate leads to disqualification. In the past, ski jumpers have been disqualified from competition because their suits did not comply with the rules.
Lessons learned: Operational excellence aims to increase a company's performance while complying with all legal regulations. Performance and compliance only work hand in hand. Know all the regulations that are relevant to your industry. Establish an integrated management system to demonstrate compliance with regulatory requirements and use a repository to document the basic assets, such as processes, responsibilities or data, only once and in a reusable way.
Biathlon
In biathlon, mistakes like shooting errors are not desired, but very often cannot be avoided. For success, it is very important to think ahead about the procedures for these cases, reloading or penalty laps for example, and to practice their optimal sequence.
Lessons learned: Be prepared for unexpected events like cyber-attacks, natural disasters, or critical infrastructure failures to enable quick response and recovery. Work out alternatives and ‘plan B’ scenarios. Describe these procedures as part of your business continuity management system.
Alpine skiing and ski jumping
Especially in disciplines such as alpine skiing or ski jumping, where a measurement of time or jumping distance decides the result, analyses play a paramount role in initiating necessary corrections. It is not enough to look only at the result as for improvements, the entire process and the relevant leading indicators, such as intermediate times, must be analyzed.
Lessons learned: The traditional business intelligence approach of measuring metrics is not sufficient to really identify the causes in the business processes and to initiate improvement measures. Start with the leading indicators and use process mining and task mining technologies to see where the weak points and optimization potentials are in the processes. Establish a holistic process management with these analytical technologies as important components.
Figure skating
In some disciplines, like figure skating, there is no objective, quantitative measurement. Rather, the result is evaluated by judges and the basis of success is a precise knowledge of the requirements and the evaluation system.
Lessons learned: Ultimately, it is the customer who decides whether your offer meets with approval. Know and analyze the requirements of your target group as precisely as possible. Analyze all interactions and touchpoints along the entire customer journey to identify weaknesses and optimization potential. Integrate the internal processes and the external customer journeys to a common picture focusing on customer satisfaction.
Whether you like the mechanics of competitive sport or not, professional athletes use a lot of the practices that underpin high-performance teams. It makes sense to use these experiences for operational excellence in your company as well.
