Fosbury Didn't Jump Harder
There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.
— Peter Drucker
3 min read
At the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, a tall American ran at the high-jump bar on a curve, turned his back to it and went over head-first, facing the sky.
To the crowd it looked wrong. High jumpers were supposed to roll over the bar face-down, the way everyone had been taught. Dick Fosbury did something that seemed to contradict the sport itself. He won the gold medal with an Olympic record of 2.24 metres. Four years later, his "wrong" technique was everywhere.
His own explanation was almost disappointingly modest: "What I had developed worked for me."
I keep coming back to that jump, because most of us face a version of Fosbury's problem every week. We just don't solve it the way he did.
He changed the question
The conventional technique hadn't worked well for Fosbury at school. He could have responded the way most of us respond to a ceiling: train more, push harder, add another session. Instead he experimented with a different way over the bar, one that suited his body.
He wasn't trying to beat the bar by working ten times harder within the same movement. He changed the geometry of the attempt.
That's the difference between two kinds of improvement. Linear improvement pushes more effort through the same system: faster, longer, more. Nonlinear improvement changes the system the effort flows through. One asks how to move faster along the current road. The other asks whether this road can reach the destination at all.
When your goal grows, the natural instinct is linear. Add another project. Add another tool. Add another evening. Add a productivity technique to manage everything you've already added. Soon your calendar looks like an overpacked suitcase, and the only idea left is to press harder on the lid.
The trap of doing the wrong thing well
Peter Drucker's line at the top of this article names the danger exactly. Cutting a routine from twenty minutes to ten feels like progress. But if the routine doesn't need to exist, the real improvement isn't fifty per cent. It's elimination. The gain comes from questioning the task, not from speeding it up.
This is why I've come to think efficiency can be a trap. It rewards us for getting better at the old method, so we never ask whether the old method deserves to survive. Fosbury could have spent years polishing a technique that didn't suit him. Many of us do exactly that with our working week.
What this looks like on a Tuesday
Picture a consultant who wants to serve ten times as many clients. Here's an illustration, not a real case. The linear plan is absurd: ten times as many discovery calls, ten times as many bespoke explanations, ten times as many follow-up emails, ten times as many loose promises to remember.
The redesigned plan starts somewhere else:
- Which questions come up with every client? They can become one clear guide.
- Which information could clients send through a simple intake form before the first call?
- Which follow-ups say the same thing every time, and could be prepared once?
- Which decisions genuinely need the consultant, and which are just waiting for them out of habit?
The consultant still works hard. Redesign isn't a promise of effortless success. But the work changes character. Instead of personally pushing every unit through the system, they build a system that can carry more units without multiplying every human action.
That's the backwards jump. Same bar, same body, different method.
Your three questions
You don't need to reinvent your whole job this week. Pick one outcome you care about, and ask:
- If I had to achieve ten times this result using my present method, which task would become impossible first? That task is usually where your method is capping the result.
- Which part of it am I keeping because it's familiar, not because it works?
- What would I stop, simplify or hand over before adding anything new?
Then run one small, safe experiment for seven days. Fosbury didn't change his technique on the day of the Olympic final. He tested it, long before anyone was watching.
The bar is still there. The question is whether you keep trying to go over it the way you were taught, or find the way that works for you.
This article draws on Chapter 5 of Your Time Is Not the Bottleneck. The 10X Redesign Index, a seven-question worksheet built around these questions, is free at multipra.com/10x.
