What is a TrimTab?

Airplanes and Tankers are the most common users of trimtabs. Originally to - trim - a boat meant to get it into a desired position. In a way that is exactly what trimtabs do; they get you, your team, or your organization into a - desired position.

The trimtab is a small rudder on the rudder or wing that enables a strategic and powerful shift or adjustment while moving. Buckminster Fuller provided an analogy, shared by Peter Senge in The Fifth Discipline (Currency Doubleday, New York, New York, 1990, p. 64), which explains the value of trimtabs:

What makes the trimtab such a marvelous metaphor for leverage is not just its effectiveness, but its nonobviousness. If you knew absolutely nothing about hydrodynamics and you saw a large oil tanker plowing through the high seas, where would you push if you wanted to turn left? You would probably go to the bow and try to push it to the left. Do you have any idea how much force it requires to turn an oil tanker going fifteen knots by pushing on its bow? The leverage lies in going to the stern and pushing the tail end of the tanker to the right, in order to turn the front to the left...

You see, ships turn because their rear end is - sucked around. The rudder, by being turned into the oncoming water, compresses the water flow and creates a pressure differential. The pressure differential pulls the stern in the opposite direction as the rudder is turned...

The trimtab---this very small device that has an enormous effect on the huge ship---does the same for the rudder. When it is turned to one side or the other, it compresses the water flowing around the rudder and creates a small pressure differential that sucks the rudder in the desired direction.

The entire system---the ship, the rudder, and the trimtab---is marvelously engineered through the principle of leverage. Yet, its functioning is totally nonobvious if you do not understand the force of hydrodynamics.

So, too, are the high-leverage changes in human systems nonobvious until we understand the forces at play in those systems.

At TrimTab Solutions...we are specialists at discovering the - trimtabs, the non-obvious things, that will turn your business in a new direction.

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