"Tackle the monkey first." —Dr. Astro Teller | A Bit of Optimism #Podcast

4 Sept 2024 · 1 min

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Dr. Astro Teller and Simon Sinek use a monkey and pedestal metaphor to explain why teams build visible infrastructure before solving core problems. Ego and short-term incentives push people to show progress rather than tackle the hard technical or human challenge first.

If you were trying to teach a monkey to stand on the top of a 10 foot pedestal and recite Shakespeare, what should you do first? Train the monkey or build the pedestal? There's no point building the pedestal first. All of the risk is can you train the monkey? But when you actually look, almost all the time, everyone's building pedestals because then you can be half done. You spent a couple years, you got a bonus, you got a promotion.
Because egos are fragile, right? And we've all been in this meeting where because we don't want to hurt anybody's feelings, we go, great job to the monkey Shakespeare project team. Brilliant job building this pedestal. That's exactly what we envision with this perfect pedestal. And we do this in the meetings for good reasons.
We don't want to be like, what.
The hell are you doing building the pedestal?
Like train the monkey right.