This week’s Sunday Story is all about the nitty gritty of transformation and disruption, and why it’s so darn hard to take one and make it the other. And Monkeys. It's also about monkeys.
There’s an anecdote in a book called “Competing for the Future” by Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad that does a great job of illustrating why change is so hard for groups of people. The book implies that this anecdote was based on an experiment, but I’ve not found any evidence of the experiment actually happening, so it’s best to treat this story as apocryphal. But the lesson in the story is real, and it speaks to the biggest challenge that leaders often face when encountering disruptive times. Here’s how it goes:
There are 5 monkeys in a room, and in the centre of a room is a ladder with bananas at the top. Whenever one of the monkeys tries to climb the ladder to get the bananas, all the other monkeys are sprayed with cold water. Before long, the monkeys start preventing each other from climbing up the ladder - it’s the only way to avoid getting sprayed.
Then, one of the monkeys is replaced with a brand-new monkey. This monkey doesn’t know the monkey culture, and so he does what any monkey would do and he goes for the bananas. The other monkeys spring into action and beat him up - and he has no idea why. Some time passes and he goes again for the bananas, and again he gets beat up.
Then they swap out another monkey. When that monkey goes for the bananas, all the monkeys - even the other new monkey - jump on him and beat him up.
Pretty soon they take away the bananas.
And replace all the monkeys.
And what persists is a culture of beating each other up whenever a monkey goes near the ladder. None of them know why they are doing this behaviour - only that it’s the done thing.
This is your organization in a nutshell. In fact, this is every organization I’ve ever worked with, to varying degrees. The Bananas on the ladder might be a new or innovative way of serving a client that’s met with a “We tried that before and it didn’t work”. There’s lots of examples of this.
And that’s why disruption tends to hit us so hard. We are creatures of unquestioning habits most of the time - we all have our things that we beat up other monkeys for without thinking through why we are doing that. This is a concept that goes back to the Greeks - Aristotle famously said “we are what we repeatedly do…therefore, excellence is not an act, but a habit” and you can replace ‘excellence’ with any other descriptor there and be correct. But by definition, disruptive forces - AI, UAPs, world wars, housing crises, and more - are external forces that come and mess with your habits. 9/11 changed how we travel and what we tolerate in terms of privacy; our prior habits of the 1990s were disrupted on that fateful day in 2001. Folks living in jurisdictions being ravaged by climate-change driven major events, like flooding or wildfires, are having their regular habits interrupted by those things. COVID-19 forced us out of our normal habits of getting up and going to work and we all locked down for months or in some cases years.
Disruptors are, by definition, things that come from outside our area of control and mess up our habits.
So how does a leader take advantage of this monkey story to understand how to make disruption a transformation instead?
Imagine if one day, one of the monkeys introduced to the experiment was a super smart monkey like Cesar from Planet of the Apes, with his ability to speak and lead other apes to great things (from the ape perspective anyway). Cesar would be in a position to say “Hey monkey-friends, has anyone stopped to consider why we beat each other up near the ladder? Does anyone remember why this all started?”
And that’s the secret for leaders: If you want for disruption to happen to you, you are always going to be surprised by it when it shows up. But if you lean into transformation instead, then you will constantly be asking that singular, powerful question: Why do we do this thing that we do?
Getting to the core of the purpose of a thing - whether it’s a workplace process, an annual retreat agenda, or a daily habit like stopping at the Starbucks on the way to work - is an incredibly powerful tool for embracing transformation. This is because it puts you on a path of continuous improvement - if you are constantly interrogating your purpose, you will constantly be revisiting your habits, and instead of focusing on the habit itself (beating up the monkeys), you’ll focus on the reason why you have that habit (avoiding getting sprayed). And with that focus, you might notice that the scientists took away the spraying mechanism at the same time they took away the bananas - they didn’t need them anymore, because the monkeys didn’t question their habits and self-perpetuated this culture of control and no bananas.
If you are continuously improving your context with a focus on why you do the things you do, when a disruptor hits you’ll be much better prepared to pivot. Your why doesn’t change - that’s pretty static, and disruption rarely impacts a core “why”. But it often impacts the habits - the “how” - we achieve that why, so when a person is in a state of continuously improving that “how” in order to stay true to their “why”, when that how gets disrupted, the pivot to a new how - the transformation - is as natural as breathing.
It sounds simple, but it’s not easy. It requires a great deal of reflection by leaders, and perhaps more importantly it requires vigilance; it’s a conscious effort usually, not something people do naturally. We are creatures of habit after all - and we tend to like those routines and habits. Interrogating the reason behind those habits will help turn disruption into transformation instead!
Stay tuned next week - we’re going to be quite musical! - and thanks for reading. See you next Sunday.
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