The high jump is a good example of changing the way we think about progress and became a means for improving performance. For decades, the method that virtually all high jumpers used was the straddle method of jumping. Using this method, the jumper kicks one foot up and rolls over the bar face down. The straddle method required leg strength in order to start the jump with the force needed to clear the high jump bar. Many young high jumpers did not have this leg strength and therefore only the naturally strong were successful at the high jump.
Prior to 1968, the record for the high jump remained at 7' 5 3/4" achieved only once by Valerie Brumel in 1963. We can thus say that prior to 1968 this was the "best practice" for the high jump because it qualifies as the highest jump that anyone has been known to achieve. A theoretical best practice would be one which produced the highest possible jump. Although we haven't quite figured out exactly what that would be based on physics, current sized people should be able to exceed 9 feet.
Dick Fosbury, a high school student from Medford, OR, changed all of this. Dick, like many other high jumpers in the country, learned the method of high jumping taught to him by his coaches and modeled after the usual straddle method. His jumps, though, were mediocre at best. He just couldn't seem to grasp the straddle method of high jumping. Fosbury preferred to use more of a scissors method, popularized by children leaping fences. Eventually, he refined this technique and actually started to jump backwards from the point of take-off. His jump gained international attention and was called the Fosbury Flop.
Fosbury won the gold medal in the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City by clearing 7' 4 1/4". It is now the modern day style employed by almost all and international high jumpers. Using this new style, the world record as of 1993 was 8' 1/2" and was held by Javier Sotomayor of Cuba. Between 1900 and 1960, the average rate of improvement was 1/6" per year. If this rate continued for 400 years the world record would be about 12' 6". After the Fosbury Flop was adopted, the average rate of improvement was over 1/3" per year. The rate of progress was more than twice as much. If this were to continue, the world record would be about 18' in 400 years. Of course performance is subject to the theoretical limits of high jumping, but these trends are interesting to consider. More importantly, there are probably better ways to high jump than the Fosbury Flop that people have not thought of yet.
There are several key lessons we can learn from Dick Fosbury's example. Most importantly, we can see that people were bogged down because of one way of thinking. They kept trying to jump higher by using the existing straddle method. Most did not even question this method and were content using it as a way to improve. Reducing the gap between the theoretical best practice and even the demonstrated best practice is almost always a question of changing the existing way of thinking about how to increase performance.
Interestingly, even when Fosbury proved that he made tremendous progress in high school, his coach in college at first tried to get him to change to the straddle method. He finally accepted Fosbury's method of jumping after he worked with Fosbury for awhile. This illustrates the idea that people can not simply be told to accept a new way of doing something, even if it will make progress happen. People need to experience for themselves how adopting a new process will be beneficial and have to be taught this in a way that it makes sense to them.
There are countless other examples where human progress has been arrested due to human beliefs and actions. We will briefly discuss several more of these in our Civilization Stalls section and encourage you to be thinking of some as well. They show that the world could be quite different today, had we not been impeded by our own mental roadblocks in the past. More importantly, they raise the possibility of a profoundly different world with enormous benefits for everyone in the future.
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