Fish-Flopping Ideas And The Way You Think

I was on a call with my new team this week and someone joked that the reason our work gets taken seriously is that we don’t take ourselves seriously. Everyone laughed. Nobody disagreed. It was the truest thing said on the call, and it was delivered as a throwaway.

That joke has been rattling around in my head ever since, because it explains something companies keep saying without knowing what they mean. ClickUp says it. Half the job descriptions I read say it. We hire for how people think. It sounds like a nice sentiment about potential over pedigree. It’s actually a confession: the playbook is not the asset. It never was.

Consider Dick Fosbury. In the 1960s, every high jumper on earth cleared the bar the same way, rolling over it face-down in a technique called the straddle. It was the playbook. Coaches taught it, judges expected it, and the record books were full of it. Fosbury, a mediocre straddler, started throwing himself over the bar backwards. His own coaches tried to talk him out of it. Sportswriters compared him to a fish flopping in a boat, and they did not mean it kindly. Then he won gold in Mexico City in 1968, and within a decade the laughingstock technique was the only technique. Today nobody jumps any other way. The heresy became the playbook, which means the playbook you’re studying right now is just the last heresy that happened to win.

Beer did the same thing. When hazy IPAs first came out of Vermont, competition judges marked them down as flawed. Murky, unfiltered, wrong. The style guidelines literally had no box for them. Brewers who followed the guidelines made clear, correct, forgettable beer. Brewers who trusted their own palate over the rubric made the style that ended up carrying the entire category. I’ve poured a lot of both from behind a bar, and I can tell you which one people drive across town for.

So when I say how you think matters more than your resume, your age, or your passport stamps, I don’t mean it as encouragement. I mean it as a warning, specifically to the person who believes a proven framework will carry them. It won’t, and the reason is structural. By the time something becomes a playbook, its edge is gone. Everyone has it. A playbook is a record of how one person thought about one problem at one moment, and the moment is over. Running it faithfully doesn’t make you strategic. It makes you the fourth-best straddler in a world that’s about to jump backwards.

Which brings me back to the joke on that call. Not taking yourself seriously is not a personality quirk. It’s an operating condition. The team that can laugh at itself is the team where someone can say the fish-flopping idea out loud without calculating the reputational cost first. Seriousness is expensive. It makes every meeting a performance, and nobody proposes a backwards jump in the middle of a performance.

The uncomfortable part is that this never ends… Fosbury’s flop is now the orthodoxy, taught by the same kind of coaches who once mocked it. Hazy IPAs have style guidelines now. Whatever you figure out will calcify too, and someday a kid who doesn’t respect your playbook will clear a bar you didn’t think was clearable, backwards, while everyone winces.

Stay Positive & Say The Fish-Flopping Idea Out Loud