Stardust Global Ventures

This is a repost of a post from 2005 on my former Digital Common Sense blog. I reposted it here last year, and today it surfaced for me again after seeing someone hit it via search.

The thoughts here remain not only valid, but perhaps even more timely and pertinent than either of the times I’ve posted this in the past.

I’ve been around blogging and social media for quite sometime, and I realized that while we often hear the term echo chamber, this post more accurately describes our behavior – like the monkey cage. We continually condition and socialize ourselves to behave in certain ways that conform to the norms of our social group.

But more on that below.

In a conversation today a colleague and I talked about this old analogy. It left me thinking about changing corporate culture and the impact of institutional memory, so I’m sharing it here again as a framework for thoughts.

Picture 5 monkeys placed in a cage. A new community is formed. From the ceiling of the cage hangs a bunch of bananas. A stepladder is placed under the bananas. As the first eager monkey rushes up the ladder, a firehose knocks him off and hoses down all the monekys. Shocked, they sit back and regroup. Later another monkey tries, with the same result. It make take repeated attempts by each monkey before they become conditioned (socialized really) to not climb the ladder.

At some point, the lesson has been learned by this closed culture and controls how they respond as a community. Then one monkey forgets and steps onto the ladder. But the firehose doesn’t have time to react. The other four monkeys grab the offender and beat him senseless. They’ve learned that in this society, you don’t climb the ladder.

Now the process of attrition and replacement in the society begins. One of the original monkeys is removed and a new monkey is added to the group. He spies the bananas and leaps onto the ladder, only to be dragged down and beaten by the rest of the group. After several attempts, the new monkey learns.

Another original monkey is replaced with a new monkey. And the same process follows. Then another and another and another. Soon we have a group of five monkeys who’ve never been soaked by the firehose, but won’t climb the ladder. This learned behavior was socialized into the group over time.

It no longer matters how many generations of monkeys follow. The new behavior is that a monkey climbing the ladder will be dragged off and beaten. None of the monkeys in the cage has ever been knocked off the ladder with a firehose. None have been soaked down. They don’t know what the consequence is because it’s been replaced by group behavior. They can’t remember being soaked. They don’t know why they do what they do. The accepted norm for this closed community is to beat anyone who tries to climb the ladder.

Isn’t that a lot like institutional memory? We don’t know why we do what we do. We do it this way because we’ve “always done it this way.” The real end consequence may no longer exist. It may not matter. It may have vanished. But we don’t climb that ladder in this cage buddy. It just isn’t done. We don’t operate that way here.

Today’s conversation led me to recount a seminar and book from several years ago (about 1990 or 91). Teaching the Elephant to Dance by Jim Belasco. That sent me on a quick Googleventure because I didn’t have my copy at hand.

“But, we’ve always done it that way,”

This is a warning sign, a symptom of impending disaster for any organization.

Shackled, like powerful elephants, to the past, organizations rob themselves of the ingenuity required to meet new competitive challenges and escape the “re” dimension trap of “re-engineering, re-organization and re-structuring that concentrate on short term fixes rather than long term solutions.

Elephant is a practical, hands-on guide for creating the right change in any organization, large or small, corporate or governmental, manufacturing or service based. Filled with illuminating case studies, it shows how to devise new corporate visions and strategies… how to overcome inertia .. and how to form labor-management partnerships. Clear, authoritative, practical and inspiring, Elephant provides a step-by-step guide for making the impossible happen.

One of the things Jim said in the small session he led that I attended was a simple tenet of business and change, but one that so often escapes managers.

If you keep doing what you’ve been doing, you’ll continue getting the results you’ve been getting.

I was pleased to see a quote from Stephen Covey on Jim’s web page. Jim’s approach to changing corporate culture is one that’s stuck with me ever since. I still have his book. I still refer to it.

Why are the obvious lessons still so hard for some organizations to learn? Change is a fundamental principle in our universe. The rate of change varies widely, but change is everywhere. Permanence is an illusion.

I don’t have an answer, nor do I seek one. I do observe that those who embrace change have an easier time of life. Those who go out and court change…embrace change…drive change, have fun and enjoy. If you resist change, well, as the Borg would say — resistance is futile. Only when we become the agent of change do we have any control over the direction change takes. Isn’t it better to steer the course and set direction than to strive to hold a straight unchanging course. Isn’t progress like sailing, constantly tacking against the winds of change? And if you insist on ignoring the wind of change, don’t you deserve that “jibe ho” just as the booms swings around to knock you into the drink?

It is far too easy for us to fall into the trap. “We’ve always done it that way” is just that, a trap. As I watch the industry, something I’ve had too much time to do lately, we share a collective malaise that Is the root of many of our problems. It’s too easy to moan and groan about the economy. It’s too comfortable to plod along doing what we’ve always done. At this point in time, in business, in society, we do not want to continue getting the results we’ve been getting. Inertia is our mortal enemy.

I’ve been watching where the successes are in the broad technology sector, and they are not from the places we always look for success. I look at the likes of Microsoft, Cisco and Google, and what I see is protectionism, hunkering down, doing what they’ve always done. In short, I see failure and mediocrity. These are not things I aspire do. They aren’t the things most of us want.

The successes, the glowing, winning, resounding stories of greatness are still there. They get buried under the slow moving avalanche of mediocrity. Small businesses are doing well and growing. Creative entrepreneurs aren’t simply finding success – they’re building new companies, new products, new solutions. They’re winning but not listening to the echo chamber. They’re ignoring the monkeys in the cage. They’re taking risks, investing of themselves and winning.

I can think of many examples among my personal network. But so can you. Think about your network, your contacts, your Facebook and Twitter friends. Who are the winners and why are they winners? I’m betting they’re simply people who are committed and doing what they need to do to win. And they aren’t winning in the Fortune 500. Today, the Unfortunate 5 Million is the place to be, among the ranks of those quietly doing what it takes to succeed.

As I twittered earlier today:

I’m not a monkey, and I don’t think like one.

How about you?