Monkeys at the Zoo? Grandma's Lamb Roast? Why you should be a Rebel at work.

At the end of this I'll ask you for your similar analogies, but bear with me I have a story to tell, twice, about why being a rebel at work is a wonderful thing.

Challenging the current hegemony is a necessary part of transformation, you can't deliver transformation with a new ICT tool, or set of processes alone, it takes genuine and cultural innovation (anyone playing buzzword bingo today?).

So, what do monkeys and sheep have to do with it? I tell a story pretty frequently about monkeys at a zoo protecting each other from harm by doing a lesser harm. then one day the primary harm is removed, the lesser harm continues to be enacted because "that's how we've always done it" or "because 'they' told us to do it that way" without knowing who 'they' are any more. (link to a version of the story here: https://workingoutloud.com/blog/the-five-monkeys-experiment-with-a-new-lesson ).

But I was reminded of a more palatable analogy (pun not intended) the other day in the kitchen. Grandma's Roast. The story basically goes that a newly-wed couple are entertaining for their grandmother and extended family with the big feature dish being a lamb roast the way Grandma always made it. So they invite her into the kitchen while they're putting it together to tap into her wealth of knowledge on the sentimentally perfect roast. Fond memories of watching and helping in the kitchen as children come flowing back, marinating, stuffing in the twigs of herb, remembering the smell of the gravy after, and so on. One of the newly-weds gets out the cleaver and lines up the roast to cut the end off, just like Grandma always did, when she stops them.

Why are you cutting the end off?

Because you always did Grandma.

But you have a huge oven silly, mine wouldn't fit otherwise!

If we don't ask the question about why certain things are the way they are in the hegemony/current cultural paradigm, we will waste a lot of lamb. Or we'll keep beating up our fellow monkeys for just trying to get to the food. It could be that a previous constraint, such as a piece of legislation, has been removed or that there is an opportunity to improve a process that someone hadn't considered. The best placed person to challenge those assumptions is you.

I saw this great poster on the wall of a potential client the other day, and I am very enthused by the great work being done out there to make it OK to challenge the norm in a deliberate measured way. It's not supposed to be an extremist anarchy after all otherwise no progress would ever get made. Source: https://www.rebelsatwork.com/blog/2018/10/30/trust-is-a-muscle

It really doesn't matter what role you are playing in your organisation, aspiring to be a productive rebel is a surefire way to make sure you waste as little roast as possible and get positive change happening.

If you are a leader of change this means taking this idea and using it to manage up, certainly, but also creating the environment for your teams to work in that supports their rebellion. Making it explicit what their role is, how much empowerment they have to be rebellious with (be it time and/or dollars) and what is the best way for them to achieve this. It's true there are methodologies in this space, scrum, PRINCE2, lean, kanban, etc etc, but none of them will be as successful as they could be without a cultural shift to empowering staff to challenge current ways of working to improve them.

As promised, I'm always on the look out for useful analogies as part of being a good coach and trainer particularly. Do you have one that tells a similar morality tale to these? Do you have a different one entirely that you'd like to share? Send me a message, give me a call, let me know if we can catch up for a cuppa!

Afterword:

Another version of grandmas roast can be found here, if you read the whole article you'll see an interesting thing to consider supplementing western medicine with (not replacing!!), but my thoughts on the power of positive thinking are best reserved for another post entirely, or a cup of something my shout? https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/thinking-makes-it-so/201402/the-pot-roast-principle