Eugene Omalla, Lieke Klaver, Isaya Klein Ikkink, Femke Bol ran 4x400m (just short of a mile) in 3:07.43 at the Paris Olympics for the Netherlands. Let’s say you and three other members of your team get picked to race against them. Unless you’re amazingly lucky with your team mates you’d probably get lapped on the track right?

So how would you beat them? Well… Lets change the rules a bit. You and your team get to run a normal relay. The Netherlands team have their legs tied to each other like it’s a three-legged race. (Five-legged in this case.) You’d probably lap them in this scenario, they might not make it round the track once. This is the cost of synchronisation.

In a relay you only need to co-ordinate at the handover point, and you are free to go as fast as you can between handovers. In a three-legged race every move needs to be co-ordinated and the more people involved the harder it is to make sure everyone is in sync.

In your day to day work, what requires more than one person or team to be completely synchronised to progress? Could you turn it into more of a relay?