Engagement Technique: “Will it?”
The phrase “Will it make the boat go faster?” was made famous by Olympic rower Ben Hunt-Davis. His gold-medal winning team asked themselves this question before every decision, and it changed everything.
They went from no podium finishes to Olympic Gold in Sydney with this straightforward, laser focused approach.
Here’s the story of Will it:
You can adapt this idea to work brilliantly as an employee engagement exercise, helping teams focus on what really drives results while clearing out the tasks that waste time.
How it works
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Week One: Ask your team to journal what they do in a typical week. Every meeting, task, and activity. Explain the concept, so they understand ‘why’.
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Week Two: Come together as a group and reflect. For each item, ask: “Did this make the boat go faster?”
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Highlight the tasks that genuinely help achieve goals and those that don’t.
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Agree as a team how to reduce or stop the low-value work, while doubling down on the activities that drive progress.
Why it works
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Efficiency: Helps people see where time is lost.
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Relief: Clears unnecessary tasks, taking a load off the team.
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Focus: Sharpens attention on what really contributes to success.
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Positive framing: This is not a “call out” exercise. It’s about improvement, not blame, just as Ben Hunt-Davis intended.
Applied regularly, the Will It Make the Boat Go Faster exercise encourages teams to be stricter with their time, sharper in decision-making, and kinder to themselves by letting go of the things that don’t move them forward. And it’s just as powerful in personal life as it is in business.
For more on this approach, check out the Will it website.
This post is part of our Engagement Techniques series of practical, low-cost ideas to bring more connection and meaning into work. Find the rest here
👉 Want to explore techniques like this in more depth? I run interactive employee engagement workshops where we bring these ideas to life.