If you’ve not yet heard the Mal­colm Glad­well pod­cast Revi­sion­ist His­to­ry then check it out now! My favourite episode so far is about the leg­endary bas­ket­ball play­er Wilt Cham­ber­lain who in 1962 scored an incred­i­ble 100 points in one game, the only play­er in NBA his­to­ry to do so. What’s more incred­i­ble is that Cham­ber­lain scored 28 of his 32 free throws. A suc­cess rate of 87.5%. What’s more incred­i­ble is that his aver­age suc­cess rate was nor­mal­ly 50%.

So what account­ed for the mas­sive increase in his suc­cess? A sim­ple change in tech­nique. Instead of shoot­ing with his hands above his heads he held the ball between his legs with his arms hang­ing straight down. This is a more ergonom­i­cal­ly nat­ur­al posi­tion for your arms and there are less mechan­i­cal issues that can go wrong in release result­ing in a more accu­rate shot. It is also a “soft­er shot” with a less flat tra­jec­to­ry. There­fore a shot that would have pre­vi­ous­ly bounced off the rim and out was now more like­ly to land.

This shot is more com­mon­ly known as the “granny” shot and due to how Cham­ber­lain felt that this was per­ceived he soon returned to the more tra­di­tion­al over­head shoot­ing tech­nique for free throws and, you guessed it, his suc­cess rate dropped and teams returned to foul­ing Cham­ber­lain as, at 7 foot 1, he was like­ly to score around the net but if you fouled him then there was a 50% chance he would miss. Instead of win­ning games for his team his pride got in the way and he con­tin­ued to shoot over­head.

How many times in our busi­ness life’s do we stop doing some­thing that we know is work­ing because some­thing else comes up. Do you even know what is and isn’t work­ing — do you test and mea­sure and retest and mea­sure again?

The small changes that we can make can make huge dif­fer­ences to our busi­ness. What good idea are you going to adopt today?