Preparing for a management workshop, I was searching for a way to illustrate how effective change can be achieved through either a series of small steps or one giant leap. Perhaps thinking this way caused me to remember Dick Fosbury, the originator of the eponymous “flop” which won him the gold medal in the men’s high jump at the 1968 Mexico Olympic Games. “Ah”, I thought, “that’s a good one” – a new technique which caused one man to make significant progress – but my initial thinking was wrong.
Before doing my research, I constructed in my mind a whole session based on the assumption that Fosbury’s pioneering technique illustrates how sometimes one hasto change the system completely in order to make significant progress, with the intention of posing the question to my audience of whether their company was in a phase of small, incremental growth or whether it was a ‘Dick Fosbury’ they needed. Feeling very pleased with myself I then went searching for the numbers to validate my theory – and had quite a shock.
Fosbury won gold with a height of 2.24m but didn’t get close to the 2.28 world record set five years earlier by the Soviet Union’s Valeriy Brumel in Moscow during 1963. Indeed Dick never made the record books, not once did he get close to the world record set using the ‘straddle’ technique. Further research showed that since the 2.0m mark was first jumped by American George Horine in 1912 there have been 45 world records (including several disputed and declared “unofficial” ones) 37 of which have been an increase of just 1cm, with the largest single improvement being 4cm by another American, John Thomas who was merely beating his own previous best in 1960, a year when he did so 5 times.
Since the Fosbury Flop was adopted as the only method to compete at the highest levels of the high jump, the world record has been broken nineteen times, most recently by the current holder, Cuban Javier Sotomayor, with a height of 2.45m. And so I thought that was it – all I’ve now got is an example of an activity that has only ever seen small, incremental steps as opposed to one large one. But again I was wrong. On looking more closely I saw that Sotomayor’s record was set in 1993 and on double checking discovered that despite all the advances in just about every field of sport, for 16 years his achievement hasn’t been equalled, never mind beaten – in fact this is the longest standing world record in athletics today.
So I returned to my original idea and concluded that actually Dick Fosbury does deserve his status, as perhaps the only high jumper people can name, despite never raising the bar himself. I say this because it must have taken the athletes of the late sixties some time to adjust – imagine if you’ve been perfecting an established process and some upstart comes up with a new idea, (one that doesn’t get close to your best performance by the way), are you going to rush off and adopt it? No, the ‘Fosbury Flop’ took some years to perfect, perhaps requiring a whole new generation to master it before scaling unimaginable new heights for the next 25 years. But the fact is that the ‘flop’ would appear to have had its day. Maybe what high jumping requires now is another Dick Fosbury, a radical new approach or method which whilst not necessarily giving the originator that much of a gain, nonetheless allows others to take the new idea on and press forward to achieve even better things. And so I was able to take my idea forward and present it to my audience, indeed it came out even better than I had originally imagined because it goes to show what many innovators have discovered – a new idea might not immediately yield a significant dividend and, like all ideas that have come before it needs to be built on, honed and refined to really reach new heights.
I wonder just how many new ideas have been labelled flops because they didn’t yield immediate progress; perhaps you might have several that are worth revisiting rather than searching, yet again, for the elusive “Fosbury” one?
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