The Little Drag

Back in the day, I was sailing Lasers competitively. They were light, fast boats in a tight, unforgiving fleet, and every detail mattered. In one race, still new to the sport, I found myself ahead of an Olympian. That should not have been possible. It was not better tactics. It wasn't that I was sailing in better winds or currents.

It turned out that a tiny piece of plastic, no bigger than a chocolate wrapper, was stuck to his rudder. That was all it took. A few centimetres of drag, and no amount of skill could overcome it.

That race taught us a core truth in sailing, that unwanted friction was the enemy of performance. We used to spend more time sanding and fairing hulls than anything else, because in a one-design class, where everything is equal on paper, the smoothest hull holds an advantage.

Before the last Golden Globe Race, I spent nearly two weeks doing the same tthing. Fairing the hull, filling gaps and reshaping fittings to reduce drag. Just a few millimetres a day could give you a real advantage in 8 months of racing.

It is the same in any organisation. You can have Olympic level talent and a solid strategy, but if friction creeps in through inefficient processes, clunky systems or misaligned teams, performance suffers.

Want to go faster? Find your plastic wrapper first.

And thats what my fellow competitor did. A quick swoosh of the hand around the rudder and he dislodged the wrapper.

And in no time, he zoomed past me.