Monkeys and Pedestals
Monkeys and Pedestals
Imagine you are going to take on the task of teaching a monkey to juggle torches while standing on a pedestal in the town square (admittedly absurd but stick with me). Two tasks are competing for your time and attention: training the monkey and building the pedestal. One is a possibly stubborn obstacle. And the other is building the pedestal. The bottleneck, the hard thing, is getting the monkey to juggle those flaming torches. Simply put, there is no point in building pedestals if you can’t solve for the monkey.
For many of the challenges we face, it can be tempting to solve the easy part of the problem first. There’s logic there. It can give momentum to the team, it can give a sense of accomplishment, it can give us an illusion of being closer to the solution. But the reality is that if we don’t know how to solve the monkey of our problem, we may be putting time and resources into a pedestal that isn’t needed.
There are two takeaways from this.
One, organizationally it can feel like nothing is happening to address a problem, but what may be happening is that people are trying to figure out the monkey before the visible change can take place.
Two, what are the monkeys and pedestals of the problems you are trying to solve? Reflect on that and you may save yourself time and frustration from time lost to unsolvable problems.