Where the waffle sole hits the road --- applying new behaviors to achieve business impact

Friends have been asking me to submit a post about the “apply” portion of the learning cycle.

If you have been sticking with me as I have gone through this, you know that I am pondering the learning cycle:

Recognize – Extract – Reflect – Apply – Share

And as I have pondered the ‘apply” portion of the cycle myself, I have wondered, “what actually does separate this stage from the earlier Reflect stage?”

Well, if “Reflect” is about thinking through how extracted knowledge has meaning for our workflows, creating hypotheses about needed changed behavior, and so forth…then perhaps “Apply” is the natural next step of actually applying those changes in the workplace.

So it necessarily means demonstrating the behaviors that support the extracted knowledge and identified changes from the previous stages. It truly is the point at which “intellectualized” learning becomes “operationalized”. In a way, it’s the point at which not behaving differently would create profound dissonance within us as we know that what we have been doing just won’t get us where we want to go.

In business we might talk about “where the rubber meets the road.” But as I am such a movie fan, I am immediately drawn to a story and might instead say, “it’s where the waffle sole hits the road”.

Not sure how many of you are aware of the story of Steve Prefontaine. He was a great middle distance runner from the 1970’s --- there I go dating myself again --- and he was truly a game-changer in the sport of middle distance and long distance running. At one point he held the American record in seven different events from the 1500 meters to 10,000 meters competitions.  In college he was only defeated three times and gained a reputation for extremely hard running and never relinquishing leads.

In fact, he once said, "No one will ever win a 5,000 meter by running an easy two miles. Not against me." And he would later state, "I am going to work so that it's a pure guts race. In the end, if it is, I'm the only one that can win it". 

Oddly, despite his reputation for leading early instead of holding back until the last lap in longer races, Prefontaine had tremendous leg speed and his career best for the mile (3:54.6) was only 3.5 seconds off the world record at the time. So in many ways he was profoundly successful while being talented in an unusual way.

But none of this translated into international success unfortunately. He ran in the 1972 Olympics, losing in an epic context against Lasse Viren in the last lap and was tragically killed in a car accident in 1975 as he trained for Montreal.

Now why do I share this story with you as an example of “Apply” from the learning cycle?

You see Prefontaine was notoriously difficult to coach. The quotes I offered up earlier illustrate his powerful sense of self and, given his success in the US, he felt no one could actually coach him, tell him how to run faster. He was beating everyone after all.

His coach Bill Bowerman, of Nike fame, took a different approach. Rather than telling him to stop taking leads, he told him to alternate his speed and by doing so confuse the other runners. This would allow him to run “negative splits” across the entire race rather than simply going out fast and getting so far in front no one could catch him. In other words, Bowerman was saying, “if you really want to go fast and make it a gut race, then sprint, recover, sprint, recover, sprint.”

Now, this is important, and it connects to business nicely. You see, we’re always saying to people “do better”. In our performance reviews, we’re always saying “get better at this”,  “do this” --- whatever “this” might be. So for instance…I hear this all the time ---- “collaborate better!” But what does “collaborate” look like? If I don’t know, I can’t apply it. I might get to the Reflect portion of the learning cycle but then still never demonstrate collaborative behaviors. I need to know what they look like in the wild.

And what Bowerman did nicely for Prefontaine, and what Prefontaine did so well at the end of his career, was actually demonstrate the behavior in races. His leads remained evident but he shaped the race differently, sprinting to the lead, recovering, then sprinting again, recovering and then again sprinting to the finish --- running faster at the end of the race than at the beginning. Truly amazing.

It’s what makes his passing all the more tragic ---he was taken away precisely at the moment he was demonstrating the right behaviors on the track and improving performance dramatically.

So the lesson for us is clear ---the Apply stage of the learning cycle is when our waffle soles hit the road. It’s when, after recognizing the need for changed behavior, extracting some new knowledge about a situation and needed behavior, and reflecting on what it might mean for us in the real world, we actually do it. It’s where we risk failure and trigger another round of learning.

Now, it doesn’t always mean we win the race. Prefontaine struggled against his nemesis Lasse Viren. But it does mean we are successfully driving the learning cycle, making our teams and ourselves better.