🐟 The Flying Fish Paradox

Why Free Fish Can’t Buy Real Loyalty

Here is a question I ask every executive who hires a coach and then wonders why nothing changes: Can you tell the difference, from the outside, between an employee who is committed and one who has simply learned to comply? Most leaders cannot. And that gap — between the signal they believe they’re sending and the response they’re actually producing — is one of the most expensive measurement failures in organizational life.

I watched it play out in real time this morning on a sun-baked street in Sipalay City, Philippines, during the Flying Fish and Kite Festival parade. Ninety minutes of live behavioral data, no survey required.

The Parade: What the Data Looked Like

The student marching bands arrived first. From the neck down: crisp, regulation uniforms, gleaming brass — standard American-influenced formation. From the neck up: the schools and the city had issued each band a coordinated set of ornate helmets and headdresses. Professionals had designed these pieces to be beautiful, Philippines style. They were standard festival kit, produced by institutions. And yet they were extraordinary — colorful, intricate, visually alive in a way the institutions clearly had not planned and equally clearly could not suppress. Beauty, it turns out, is harder to coerce out of a culture than compliance is to coerce into it.

The students had signed up for a marching band. In that sense, their participation was nominally voluntary. In practice, for most, opting out mid-season was not a realistic option. Roughly 5% were visibly enjoying themselves — a few kids smiling, dancing slightly off-beat, playing percussion with genuine pleasure. The rest were executing the motions: present in body, elsewhere in mind.

Then came the adults. City government staff marched behind the students, followed by military and coast guard units. All compelled to participate. None appeared to have forgotten it. The expression was uniform: upright, technically present, radiating the specific spiritual flatness of people whose attendance is mandatory and whose enthusiasm is theirs to withhold — and who have correctly identified that the second clause is the only freedom remaining. Roughly 5% exercised it via phone.

Organizational researchers call this surface acting: the performance of expected behaviors while internal states remain entirely elsewhere. Its opposite is deep acting: genuine engagement that flows from actually caring about what you’re doing. The government-issued helmets, accidentally beautiful, were the only deep acting visible from the sidewalk. Everything else was surface, all the way down.

Free Fish and the Limits of Reciprocity

After the parade, the Mayor deployed a well-worn freebie: all-you-can-eat flying fish for the public, funded by city tax revenue. This has become an annual tradition, which is the first problem. Reciprocity — the drive to return what we have been given — depends on unexpectedness and sincerity. An expected annual gift, funded by the very people receiving it, scores low on both. The fish were good. The persuasion was not.

The deeper issue is sequence. Ethical influence requires priming receptivity before the ask. This parade primed something else. You cannot compel behavior all morning and purchase genuine warmth with lunch. The pre-suasive damage was done before the first fish was served.

The Speech: When Charisma Meets a Dirty Channel

I am told the Mayor gave an inspiring speech later in the day. I believe it. Genuine charisma works through twelve measurable behavioral techniques: metaphor, story, contrast, rhetorical questions, three-part lists, moral conviction, collective sentiment, ambitious goals, confidence in attainment, vivid language, animated tones, and expressive affect. TruMind.ai scores all twelve from transcripts. A leader operating at a high level of systematic charisma can genuinely shift follower motivation and performance — not just surface-level intentions.

But assessment work has taught me what no speech coach says plainly: charisma is a signal, not a lever. It transmits only when the channel is clean. The Mayor’s words were the signal. Her reported absence after the speech — MIA once formal obligations were discharged — was noise. The patronage structure tying employees’ careers to personal loyalty rather than performance is noise. A parade staffed by visibly coerced participants from city hall, the military, and the coast guard is noise. As my colleague Professor John Antonakis has documented: when behavioral noise exceeds the charismatic signal, the message does not land.

“You can compel a body to march.

You cannot compel a brain to care.”

Authority requires both expertise and trustworthiness. Trustworthiness is built through behavioral consistency — alignment between what you say and what you do in a way that is mutually beneficial. When that fails, you do not have reduced expertise. You have a credibility debt that compounds with every subsequent speech. The staff who marched this morning have been calibrating their expectations against that gap for years. Their disengagement is not cynicism. It is pragmatic.

Management vs. Leadership: The Neck-Down Problem

Management is neck-down: it controls bodies, schedules, and compliance outputs. It made every adult show up and walk a straight line. The coast guard stood at attention. The KPIs were met.

Leadership is neck-up. And here is the thing about those fanciful helmets: the city and the schools issued them. No one planned for them to be beautiful. They were standard festival inventory. Yet something in Ilonggo hands and Philippino aesthetic sensibility made them extraordinary anyway — quietly, within the constraints given. That unintended beauty is the precise organizational equivalent of discretionary effort. You cannot mandate it. You can only build the conditions that allow it to survive.

Ethical persuasion must be true, natural, and wise. Compelled attendance fails all three. It is the organizational vending machine: insert sufficient pressure, receive the required output. The moment the pressure lifts — the parade ends, the manager leaves the room — people go exactly where their actual commitment points. For essentially every adult in that parade, that direction was: anywhere but here.

The Measurement Problem — and What to Do About It

Here is what the Mayor and most organizational leaders share: no reliable instrument for knowing whether their influence is actually working. They see outputs — the march happened, the fish were consumed, the speech received applause. What they cannot see is the behavioral substrate: the surface-acting compliance, the discretionary effort redirected elsewhere, the quiet calculation of exit options two rows back in the formation.

TruMind.ai was built for this gap. Our platform analyzes coaching transcripts to produce interval-scale scores across nine leadership dimensions and all eight ICF Coaching Competencies — with fifteen times more measurement precision than traditional high-stakes credentialing exams. That precision gap matters: most assessments can tell you someone is ‘good at coaching.’ TruMind tells you whether they’re asking questions calibrated to this client’s developmental level, in this session — in what we call the Goldilocks Zone, challenging enough to grow without overwhelming.

A 45-minute coaching transcript records what actually happened between two people. It does not care about job titles or whether the speech sounded inspiring. It reads the channel directly.

What the Dancing 5% Teach Us

I keep returning to those few students who were genuinely smiling. They found, within a mandatory context, some fragment of real alignment between who they are and what they were doing. That fragment is the whole argument.

“The question every leader must answer is not

‘How do I get my people to march?’

It is

‘What would make even five of them want to dance?’”

Five percent sounds modest. In practice, five percent of genuinely committed people will outperform the other 95 in every task requiring creativity, judgment, or initiative. They are not a rounding error. They are the competitive advantage — if you can find them, measure the conditions that produced them, and grow that number.

A transcript-based measurement system can now tell you, with metrological precision, whether your coaching conversations are expanding that percentage — or producing very articulate marchers.