Many firsts were achieved at the 19th Olympics held in Mexico City in October 1968. It was the first Olympics to be held in Latin America or a Spanish-speaking country. It was also the first instance when electronic timekeeping was used for all events and the first to be telecast in colour. Legendary boxer George Foreman won his heavyweight title and gold medal here, as did fellow African-American athlete Tommy Smith, who posed with the iconic ‘Black Power’ salute to usher in the civil rights struggle. However, among the many American gold medalists, a 21-year-old student, Richard Fosbury, not only broke the world record in the high jump, but also changed the sport.
Prior to the 1968 Games, the default method of performing the high jump was the ‘straddle’ technique, in which the athlete ran towards the bar and used one leg to perform their jump, leading with the other leg. Just like we clear a small fence or wall. It built powerful muscles like Valery Brummel of the Soviet Union, who held the record until 1964. Fosbury turned that strategy on the heels. At the age of 16, he began experimenting with a new technique in which the jumper would lop over the bar in an angular run-up and lead with his head instead of the legs, using one’s head, shoulders, torso and end I will clean the feet. Unlike a jump, it was literally a ‘flop’ over the bar.
As expected, this new technique was dismissed by many status quoists, including Fosbury’s own school coaches, but the results spoke for themselves as he won the selection trials for the 1968 Olympics with his unorthodox style. Continued to win in American tournaments. In Mexico City, he not only broke the world record and won gold, but changed the sport forever. Between 1972 and 2000, the ‘Fosbury Flop’ was used by 34 of the 36 medal winners, making it a real game changer. But the real genius of this technique was not in knowing how to cross the bar, but in observing what changes were taking place in the landing surface.
By the early 1960s, colleges and stadiums began replacing traditional landing pits of sand and sawdust with rubber-foam mattresses. This prompted iconoclastic athletes to try radically different methods for crossing the bar, as the foam landing was far more forgiving than the sandpit. While seasoned athletes struggled hard to cross the bar, an amateur picked up a faint hint of change and made the most of it.
The business world is also full of examples of weak signals being picked up by contrarian entrepreneurs that huge conglomerates with multimillion-dollar budgets for market research and development missed. Whether it was an upstart in the US who claimed he could sell books online or an Indian entrepreneur who discovered that it was consumer cash-flow that kept shampoo from going mainstream and then scaled it up with one-rupee sachets. But driven adoption, weak signals often get lost on the market radar of a larger organization. This is why the major players in the above sectors didn’t capture the ideas that proved to be transformative.
Latent demand or early trends appear as weak signals that are often missed by large companies. It’s not that they don’t know they have blind spots; Unfortunately, in most cases, two issues cover their early warning radar. One has to do with mindset. Second, structural.
A mindset problem is relatively simple to understand, if not fix. Most research begins with a hypothesis based on anecdotal data or some insightful observation (usually by a self-styled futurist in the organization), which the research team later attempts to validate. This usually results in a state of appreciation rather than a position of appreciation. The problem is exacerbated when existing dogma is challenged by weaker signals.
It’s not that Barnes & Noble didn’t see what Amazon was doing, or that established car makers didn’t see Tesla exploding old principles of car manufacturing, but that status quoists suppressed those signals when they were weak because This threatened them (and they could).
The second issue is structural. Predictors of weak signals and advocates of radical solutions will by definition have early failures, and despite lip service, failures are rarely rewarded in corporates. This creates a culture where even the boldest, brightest leaders gravitate towards the safer route of bureaucracy than the risky route of ‘entrepreneurship’. After all, who wants to be humiliated in a review for the failure of an audacious plan, rather than behind a desk wondering why the plan won’t work?
The hypocrisy of praising courageous failures in monthly townhall speeches but punishing them in annual evaluations is a major structural reason businesses miss key opportunities and threats.
The uniqueness of the Fosbury flop is that it originated not with the athlete production factories of the Soviet Union or America, but with a 21-year-old amateur who thought differently. Someone who really puts his head in the game and pays the price for failures. Fosbury injured his vertebrae while developing his technique, but persevered until he broke both the record and dogma. At 75, Fosbury lives to see his legacy, breaking the high jump record every time. There is a great lesson in this for us.
Raghu Raman is the former CEO of the National Intelligence Grid, Distinguished Fellow of the Observer Research Foundation and author of ‘Everyman’s War’.
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