Picture this.
Your boss hits you with a wild request and tells you to get a monkey to stand on a pedestal and teach it to spew Shakespeare lines.
Where on Earth do you even start with that?
Perhaps not surprisingly, this whole monkey business proposition comes from none other than Astro Teller, who's got the fanciest title in the world as the Captain of Moonshots at Google X.
This company is all about tackling bizarre problems with groundbreaking tech from drone deliveries and the Google Smart Spoon to some serious scientific breakthroughs like nanoparticles and computer neural networks.
Google X isn't just pushing the envelope for Google; they're pushing it for all of us.
They're revolutionizing our world.
But let's get back to the monkey.
If you're like most folks, you'd probably kick things off by crafting a killer pedestal.
After all, at some point, you know the big boss is going to drop by, asking for updates, and you definitely don't want to show her a laundry list of why teaching a monkey to talk is incredibly hard.
Instead, you'd love to have your boss pat you on the back and say, "Wow, what a pedestal! Great job!"
So, you get busy building that pedestal and cross your fingers for a Shakespeare-reciting monkey to pop out of thin air.
Ozan Varol is typing now:
Building the pedestal is the easiest part. “You can always build the pedestal,” Teller says, but “the risk and the learning comes from the extremely hard work of first training the monkey.” If the project has an Achilles heel—if the monkey can’t be trained to talk, let alone recite Shakespeare—you want to know that up front.
What’s more, the more time you spend building the pedestal, the harder it becomes to walk away from projects that shouldn’t be pursued. This is called the sunk-cost fallacy. Humans find it hard to abandon things if they’ve invested time and money on them. If you spent a bunch of time carving a gorgeous pedestal, you’ll be reluctant to call it quits.
The monkey-first attitude shut down a project called Foghorn at X. The project was promising at first: A member of X read a scientific paper about taking carbon dioxide out of seawater and turning it into affordable, carbon-neutral fuel with the potential to replace gasoline. This technology sounded like something out of a sci-fi movie, so X—true to its form—took it on.
But it turned out that the technology was the pedestal—it was relatively easy to turn seawater into fuel. The monkey was the cost. The process was expensive, particularly in the face of declining gasoline prices. So the team decided to trigger the kill switch and shut down its own project.
We all love those celebratory high-fives and backslaps, don't we?
We tend to fixate on the little wins that make us feel like we're making headway, but often, they're nothing more than an illusion of progress.
We find ourselves gravitating towards the low-hanging fruit and totally ignore the big, hairy, audacious challenges.
It's the classic pedestal-building syndrome.
Come on, who hasn't found it a cakewalk to chat about that flashy CRM software without asking “Who is it for?” and “What is it for?”
And hey, posting a boring job ad and waiting for candidates to roll in is a breeze, right?
Annual employee evaluations, in the grand scheme of things, feel like a walk in the park, because the scale is 1 to 5.
Sending out meeting invites to everyone without a clear agenda?
No sweat.
Picking a slick presentation template before formulating a takeaway message?
Child's play.
Debating which picture and logo go on the landing page before agreeing on the actual copy?
Yep, easy peasy.
Focusing on office decor over company culture?
Well, look around.
And let's not forget how simple it is to launch an e-learning platform for your employees without understanding what they really want.
But here's the kicker.
What’s easy often isn’t all that important. (And what’s important often isn’t easy.)
So, if your endgame is a Shakespeare-reciting monkey striking a pose on that pedestal, don't blow most of your resources on crafting the fanciest pedestal in town.
Because if you do, you'll wind up with a gorgeous pedestal, a monkey going bananas (and not in a good way), and a boatload of mess to clean up.
The real challenge lies in training the monkey.
Do the hard things first.
PS. Do you struggle to set yourself apart from your competitors? Does your tone of voice lack a little personality? Either way, get in touch and I’ll help you become remarkable. Or get more communication advice that doesn't suck here.
Comentarios