Olympic athletes: “talented” is the wrong adjective

“Talented” is the wrong adjective

As we sit down to watch the Olympic athletes several adjectives will come to mind: talented, gifted, amazing. But these are the wrong ones. Olympic athletes are focused, disciplined, meticulous. That is why they win.

Gold medallists ACTUALLY dream of winning gold medals. They picture themselves walking up onto the podium – night after night. That’s what a Gold Medalist told me. In his case, it was from the age of 12 up until he won Gold aged 32. Winning rarely happens at their first Olympics, despite the hard work, training, and qualifying to get there. Most Olympians compete in several Olympics before even getting close to a gold medal. However, it is more than a streak of raw talent and perseverance that drives them on.

Not JUST raw talent

Michael Phelps, the USA swimmer, is one of the most decorated Olympians ever. However, at his first Olympics in 2000 he didn’t even make the podium. In the following Olympics, Phelps came back and won six gold medals.  It’s not just about raw talent, but the ability to draw on the experience that they have built up in areas like training, mental fitness, nutrition, and swimming. He used all the training and performance data built up year on year at every training session and competition to continually improve his results. And he has gold medals to show that it works.  

This was also the case for Australian Olympic rower James Tomkins. He competed in his first Olympics and didn’t make the podium. The following Olympic year he came back and won gold for his country. In the next Olympics, he was able to win gold for the second time.

Lars Frolander was a Swedish swimmer who competed in 6 Olympics. Once again it took him a few Olympic years to win the gold.

Standing on the shoulders of giants (or themselves)

These Olympians were able to win gold medals by building on the intelligence that they had acquired through previous Olympic campaigns. This historical data gave them a massive advantage over their newer competitors even if they were stronger athletes. They worked with a whole team including trainers, physio, nutritionists, and coaches who are all drawing on that mine of performance data to help the athletes make the incremental improvements required to win by fractions of a second.

Investing in the right things works

The sport I know best is sailing as I was in the 1984 Great Britain squad when it was an amateur sport. We all took time off work to compete and got sponsors to support us. There were no dedicated coaches or access to performance data. In 2000 there was a big shift and money was pumped into the sport at an Olympic level and there was a clear increase in the medal count. Great Britain is the most successful nation in sailing at an Olympic level, even when the types of boats change each Olympics so new skills need to be acquired.

So what happened? Money went into organized training, analysis, and research into performance, tracking results, and different aspects of coaching; physical, mental, nutritional, etc. 

Interesting side note: In Tokyo 2020 two children of past medalists won medals in the sailing category.

Winning Gold for you and your Org

Winning gold requires the same raw talent, perseverance, and access to that critical intelligence that enables you to drive constant improvement. Many Salesforce teams and their orgs are like the Great Britain sailing team up to 2000. Starved of the investment they couldn’t deliver consistent long-term results. But put in place the right structure, the training, the tools, the people, and you can achieve remarkable results. There are no shortcuts.

There are strong parallels with building a strong, stable, winning Org. 

• Repeatable practice makes perfect. You need an agreed implementation approach that is rigorous and builds up that intelligence. Every release is an opportunity to fine-tune and improve it.
• It takes a range of skills. These skills may be in one person – a solo Admin – or across the team. These skills include business analysis, data analysis, architecture, user design, development/config, DevOps, and training.
• You need historical org intelligence to build on. That is all encapsulated in the org metadata and Elements.cloud can pull it into a metadata dictionary, where it can be analyzed, visualized, and made available to AI.

Not fit to win

The current orgs are carrying too much dead weight. The recent Change Intelligence Research Series is based on data from Elements.cloud. They analyze 50,000 orgs and 1.3 billion metadata per month. The levels of technical debt are staggering. 50% of custom objects are never used. 41% of custom fields are never populated and this climbs to 80% for custom fields on the core standard objects.

The root cause of this technical debt is insufficient business analysis before the teams start building, so they are building the wrong thing. So firstly you need an implementation approach that enables you to build the right thing and not add to the technical debt. You need access to that org intelligence to help you understand what technical debt is hurting you so you get in shape.

The Olympic analogy is you spend more time training but continue to eat junk food and have no data on whether you are getting better. This, sadly is the reality in many orgs that we see. 

No route to winning

The parallels with how we see orgs being managed and how this relates to Olympic athletes are illuminating. If you look at the right-hand column you see that there is no chance of the person winning a Gold with these setbacks, let alone qualifying to go to the Olympics which requires being competitive on the world stage. 

Org	Olympic
No business analysis	Not sure what it takes to win
No metadata intelligence	No idea what skills/techniques to work on
No documentation	Went training, but no record of what, where, or when
Limited skills	No support team

Long term

Remember we said, no shortcuts. Your org will have a lifetime of 10+ years. We see orgs that are over 16 years (4x Olympics) old. But at 7-8 years the levels of tech debt is so great and unquantified that teams want a fresh start. Throwing away an org is a major decision. Our experience is that with good org intelligence, this can be avoided, and the org can be managed back to good health. 

Therefore it is worth the effort to put in place a proven implementation approach, supported by tools like Elements.cloud, with the right blend of skills. This is a fraction of the cost of TCO of Salesforce. The benefits are org agility and an increase in ROI – better time to value.  This is the Olympic Gold approach.

LA2028 – the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028 – uses Salesforce. After the 2028 Olympics, their org is no longer needed. But they want the agility up to 2028, so LA2028 recognizes it is worth taking this Olympic Gold approach to org management. Their Senior Manager of Enterprise Technologies, Kat Aquino who is driving the approach, was awarded a gold hoodie at TrailblazerDX and presented in the Dreamforce keynote.

So, if they are doing it for just 4 years use of Salesforce, then every other org can get value from taking this approach. BTW: If you have any aspirations to implement Data Cloud, then this approach is mandatory. 

Less pain, more gain

But where you have an edge over the athletes, is much of this metadata intelligence is created automatically, rather than developed in training sessions that leave you exhausted in a puddle of sweat.  More and more organizations are turning to Elements.cloud to provide a Change Intelligence Platform that is an enterprise-scale, aggregated, connected view of all automated and manually created documentation and processes within the org; requirements, business process maps, architecture diagrams, user stories, org impact and dependency analysis, configuration changes, testing, and end-user help. All powered by AI.

Olympic fun facts

• Added in the 2024 Olympics: Breaking which is break dancing

• Being held 9,765 miles from Paris: Surfing, which was introduced in 2020, is in Tahiti
• Dancing: Breaking, Gymnastics, Swimming, Dressage (horse dancing)
• No longer in Olympics: Tug of war, Obstacle swimming, Racewalking

Final Word

You’re not going to win gold medals the first time. But as long as you keep on building on the previous successes and the intelligence of how you got there, you will be on your way to gold.

Photo by Gentrit Sylejmani on Unsplash