Why you need a flywheel

Colleagues,

 In my first year of teaching I was put in charge of the girls’ basketball program. That meant I was the only coach for about 50 kids on three different teams. It was a great opportunity to impact the lives of young women, but there was one problem. I didn’t know anything about basketball!
 
Additionally, because I was coaching three teams, practice time was extremely limited. In spite of these challenges, we had very successful teams, both in terms of developing people and in winning games.
 
A significant part of our success was due to our flywheel.
 
The term was coined by Jim Collins in his classic book, Good to Great. It refers to a set of practices that, when repeated over and over again, lead to organizational improvement and success.

Our basketball flywheel looked like this:

Play high pressure defense in order to force turnovers. Capitalize on turnovers by transitioning quickly and use a numerical advantage to score on fast breaks. Rinse and repeat. Our flywheel did the following:

• Kept us focused on essentials: playing defense and transitioning
• Created an aligned system in which each part benefited the other parts
• Capitalized on our strengths (lots of motivated players and my understanding of defense)
• Mitigated our weaknesses by decreasing the amount of stuff we had to be good at. For example, we spent barely any practice time on offensive sets because they weren’t integral to how we would score.

 
The flywheel constitutes strategic practices that, when engaged in consistently, drive organizational improvement.
 
I would love to feature other people’s flywheels here, so please share yours with me if you have one. And if you don’t have one…
 
Do good and be well,
 
Frederick