There’s something about watching a world record get broken that makes you feel a little itchy, Carla.
Not just because it’s faster, bigger, or better than anything that’s been done before. But because it feel like you’ve been settling for something yourself. Cruising.
When Sebastian Sawe crossed the finish line at the London Marathon in record time (under 2 hours), it didn’t just feel like a win. It felt like a shift. It’s the exponential effect of the 4-minute mile.
Over and over runners (and the coaches who coach them) have talked about breaking the barrier. But there was a little piece deep down inside of each of them had a niggling excuse for why it couldn’t be done.
The body has physiological limits. It needed the perfect storm of conditions. And then there’s the psychological barrier.
If we’re honest, results like this don’t come from doing the same thing just a smidge better. They come from seeing the problem differently in the first place.
The hidden cost of expertise
We love expertise. We reward it. We build entire careers around it. And then, without realizing it, we let it narrow our field of vision of what we believe is possible.
The longer you stay inside an industry, the more you start to see the world through its lens. You inherit its assumptions. You accept its constraints. You solve problems the way they’ve always been solved because that’s what experience has taught you works.
Until it doesn’t.
This is where smart teams get stuck. They’re not lacking talent or effort. They’re operating inside a set of rules no one’s questioned in a long time. So they make the most of the current conditions. They refine. They get faster and more efficient.
And slowly, almost invisibly, they get more predictable. They start explaining away why a new idea would never work.
You know, “That’s not how things are done around here.”
What changed behind the performance
What made Sebastian’s performance so compelling wasn’t just the athlete. It was the system around him.
Look at what Adidas (the brand of running shoe he wore) is doing with performance footwear. These aren’t shoes designed for versatility or even longevity in the traditional sense. They’re engineered for a very specific outcome, which is how energy moves through a runner’s body with every step.
Every detail is intentional. Materials. Weight. Structure. All of it focused on capturing, transferring, and returning energy as efficiently as possible.
That’s already a different way of thinking about the problem.
But here’s where it gets interesting.
What’s kitesurfing got to do with it?
Some of that thinking didn’t come from running at all.
It came from kitesurfing.
It kinda sounds like a stretch. One’s endurance on pavement. The other’s wind and water. But underneath both is the same idea. Energy is captured, redirected, and released to create motion.
In kitesurfing, small adjustments in tension and angle can dramatically change how efficiently energy moves through the system. Designers at Adidas thought that same principle could be applied to running. Every stride becomes more than impact and recovery. It becomes an opportunity to harness and return energy in a way that creates forward momentum.
That’s not a running insight.
That’s a thinking insight.
And that’s exactly why it works.
Why most teams miss this
Most teams don’t have an idea problem. They have a perspective problem.
They’re looking at competitors. Studying benchmarks. Tweaking what already exists. It feels productive, it’s easy to justify, and it keeps things moving.
But it also keeps thinking inside a closed loop.
When everyone is working from the same inputs, the outputs look the same, too. You get incremental improvement instead of bona fide change. Just different enough to notice, but not different enough to matter.
The discipline of looking outside
Looking outside your industry isn’t something you do when you have time. It’s something you have to build into how you think.
It means following ideas that don’t look relevant at first and staying with them long enough to understand the principle behind them. It means asking where else a problem like this exists and who has solved it in a way you haven’t thought of.
And most importantly, it means learning how to translate.
Because you’re not trying to copy what another industry is doing. You’re trying to understand how they think and apply that thinking in a way that creates advantage for you.
That’s where the real value lives.
The real takeaway for leaders
What happened in London wasn’t just a faster race. It was different thinking showing up in a super visible way.
And that’s the part we have to pay attention to.
Because your next breakthrough probably isn’t sitting inside your industry just waiting for you to discover it. It’s way more likely to come from somewhere that doesn’t look one bit like your industry.
The question is whether you’re willing to go there.
To look where others aren’t looking. To ask questions that feel quirky and even a bit weird at first. To connect dots that don’t seem like they have any business bumping up against each other.
That’s how records get broken.
And it’s how amazing insights find their stride.
Photo credit: Adidas
