Deal with the monkey first

Deal With The Monkey First

When clients are scoping out their strategic projects (big rocks) at the beginning of every quarter, I remind them of the “The Monkey and The Pedestal” lesson taught by Astro Teller, head of the Google X innovation lab.

Imagine your project is: “Teach a monkey how to recite Shakespeare while sitting on a pedestal” 

The trap many project teams fall victim to is focusing on the “quick wins” or “low-hanging fruit”. They race off and quickly build a pedestal to “get some runs on the board”. 

One month after the planning session, the project leader proudly informs me that the project is “on track” during our cadence of monthly strategy execution check-in meetings.

Not so fast! Are you sure?

I don’t want the client to get 2 months into the quarter and suddenly realize that the project is way off track.

Often they have shown the illusion of progress, without making any real headway toward solving the problem. They have not dealt with the monkey.

So how should you allocate your time and money between training the monkey and building the pedestal?

The right answer is to spend zero time thinking about the pedestal until you have identified and solved the monkey problem. 

The monkey is the bottleneck. The monkey is the hard problem. Nothing else matters until you solve the monkey problem.

Even worse, if you figure out that you can’t solve the monkey problem, and need to pivot to a new solution, or cut your losses and abandon the project completely, you have wasted time and resources building an unnecessary pedestal. The greater the sunk costs, the harder it is to quit the project.

Identify the monkey when scoping out your project and deal with the monkey first. Nothing else matters until you solve this bottleneck. Don’t spin your wheels on the easy stuff. Deal with the monkey first.

Here is an overview of the process I recommend my clients use to implement their Big Rocks each quarter.

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Until next time…
Stephen