There is a rather old parable that seems to be popping up at the beginning of some first time manager courses, the parable of the monkeys.

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Not to go into too much detail, it’s a story of 5 monkeys in a cage. The cage has a few bananas hung on the ceiling and a ladder leading to the bananas. However every time a monkey tries to climb up the ladder *all* monkeys are sprayed with cold water. Pretty soon the monkeys get the idea and start guarding the ladder and beating up every monkey that *attempts* to climb up. The parable goes on explaining how the keeper decides to replace one of the monkeys. The new monkey of course attempts to climb up the ladder and is promptly beaten up by it’s peers. Going further a second monkey from the original group is replaced and the story repeats itself only that the first new monkey happily participates in beating up its colleague. The story ends like this: all monkeys are replaced one by one and *the new group does not climb up the ladder and beats up anyone who attempts to do so although it never received the cold water treatment*.

Well, I am not sure if this experiment really happened or is just a parable but it does depict quite accurately how groups behave. If you think of organizations, large or small, either we are talking about a single department or  a whole enterprise (hell, I’ve seen whole countries acting this way) they will behave the same way. A negative action (cold water spray) addressed to a group of people will make immense damage and  will insure that the people in the particular group not only will not perform (climb up the ladder) but will stop anyone who attempts to do so. Of course, they will not beat up an individual attempting to perform but the group will have a certain negative attitude that prevents performance. Taking this further, even replacing the worst performers in the group will not really insure the success of the group going further since the group will still be stuck in the sticky swamps of negative attitude.

The sticky swamps of negative attitude

Imagine, as an employee you wake up every morning with trench feet from the cold water of small salaries. You are hungry, upper management does not feed you any information about where your group is going to wander today. The feeling of emptiness prevails as you know for a fact that your group is lost in the swamps and there is no map, no strategy and no direction. You and your group are doing tiring marches in circles, every day. Daily you are being stung by mosquitoes and flies from various business support departments. Thick mangrove roots block your way to the lush fields of personal development. You group is unfriendly and aggressive and there are rumors that some resorted to cannibalism. Any action takes ages, when you lift a foot out of the swamp your other foot goes deeper, you can’t move, opportunities are being missed and deadlines slip.

The feeling of emptiness is prevailing  but your manager requires you to write a positive report at the end of each week.

This may be a bit exaggerated but it is pretty much how one could feel when it’s group is the target of negative actions.

Once employees hit the sticky swamps of negative attitude it takes a strong leader to save their souls and lead them out of the swamps.

Driving organizational change

Much has been written about organizational change and the truth is that depending on what you want to do in your life you might want to follow one of the rules for surviving unpredictable times drawn up by the author of “The Black Swan”:

“[…]Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. […] “

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However you do realize that by following this advice you will do just that: survive. Should you be so inclined to want to lead your group outside the swamps you have to be sure it will be hard. Really hard.

But how to do it? Will a positive comment undo the damage of a negative comment? Will positive reinforcement help the group find the path outside the swamps? No it won’t . Because there is no outside or there is no swamp (depending on how you want to look at the problem). The  swamps are in everyone’s head and everybody’s attitude creates a swamp around the other. This problem can not be attacked on person by person basis, it needs to be addressed at a group level. How do you convince a group that the swamp is actually the primordial soup which supports life and development (i.e. it’s not a problem, it’s an opportunity)? Let me formulate the problem: a quick, drastic and far-reaching change in ways of thinking and behaving of a group of people.

Well, that’s the definition of a revolution. Should you have a revolution in the office? Maybe you should, let’s see how a revolution looks. I’ll randomly pick the Russian revolution as a case study.

The Russian revolution

(This in no way should be considered an accurate historical analysis. Facts are summarized to prove the point of the discussion)

Background

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Leadership of the empire was out of touch with the needs and aspirations of the people. An inefficient form of government was creating increased frustration with the people which grew increasingly conscious of the political situation of the country. It was clear to everyone that economic opportunities are being missed. Increasing migration to the cities was blurring the lines between social groups and boundaries.  Poor income was forcing people into poverty while the country was well behind the rest of the world in terms of industry of farming. Soldiers were dissatisfied, demoralized and started to defect.

You must admit the scenario above could be applied to any enterprise: lack of leadership, lack of clearly defined responsibilities, missed opportunities and a disconnect from the realities are the signs of a poorly led enterprise or department.

The revolution

While we all agree the above seems like a recipe for a revolution, a revolution doesn’t simply happen (well, sometimes it does and it fails, look at the February revolution). There are leaders and actions leading up to the revolution in order to insure it’s success. The true Russian revolution that everybody talks about is the October revolution.

There were a few interesting things leading up to the October revolution, I will try to summarize them below, also giving the interpreted corporate alternative:

• First, we have a leader. He is Lenin and he’s determined to go all the way.
• Lenin publishes the April theses
  • The documents are in corporate speak:
    • a gap analysis on the situation of the enterprise
    • set a a near term vision
    • describe a revised org-chart
    • define a strategy going forward
    • assigns a quick win task list for members
• Trotsky, Lunacharskii and others join the revolution
  • In corporate speak these would be the equivalents of “champions”.
• July days, failed revolution
  • The organization was not mature enough to change but change gather momentum.
• Numerous Bolshevik (means: majority) governments are formed.
  • Convinced of change, the teams go trough the forming and storming phases
• The October revolution happens
  • I guess change happens. Teams need to go trough the norming and performing phases.

Well, there you have it, the recipe for organizational change in five easy to follow steps. Just add a leader and a revolution…

Before taking this post too seriously you need to know it was written in DXB while waiting for a plane, at an hour at which most people should not be anywhere near a keyboard (and it was cut short by a dead battery, blessed be lenovo laptops). However, interestingly enough I found this book: The Bolshevik Party in Revolution: A Study in Organisational Change, 1917-1923 by Robert Service. I haven’t read it yet.