“What is your Banana?” - The 5 Monkeys Experiment

“What is your Banana?”

is a quote, I remembered being displayed on the wall near the TT-table in the kitchen area of our company premises. As curiosity bit me, I looked for the source of the above quote and while reading a book on Strategy, came across this experiment done on five monkeys.

The experiment is like this (note: the description of the experiment may not be 100% accurate as I have read from different books, it could even be a fictional story instead of a real experiment).

A group of scientists did an experiment by placing 5 monkeys in a room and at the middle they placed a ladder with bananas on the top.

• Monkeys, being tempted by banana, climbed up the ladder to pick them up.
• Every time a monkey went up the ladder to pick banana, scientists soaked the rest of the monkeys with chilling ice-cold water.
• Every time a monkey went up the ladder, the others got soaked in an ice-cold water shower.
• After a while, whenever a monkey tried to go up the ladder, others pull him down and beat him up, preventing him to go up the ladder.
• This continued for some time, and then no monkey dared to go up the ladder regardless of the temptation.
• Scientists then decided to shut off the cold water & substitute one of the monkeys.
• The 1st thing this new monkey did was to go up the ladder. Immediately the other monkeys pulled him down and beat him up.
• After several beatings, the new member learned not to climb the ladder even though he never knew why.
• Scientist then substituted 2nd monkey
• The same events occurred. The 2nd monkey was tempted to go up the ladder, and all other monkeys (including 1st replaced monkey) started beating him up.
• Then, 3rd monkey was changed and the same action got repeated.
• The 4th was substituted and the beating was repeated and finally the 5th monkey was replaced.
• The interesting point is, now all the monkeys in the group of 5 monkeys are new. They had never received an ice-cold water shower. Even then they all continued to beat up any monkey who attempted to climb the ladder, without even knowing what is the reason of beating the monkey who tries to climb up the ladder.

What can the 5 Monkeys Experiment Teach Us?

I am not really sure, if such an experiment had ever happened or not, or is it just a story. However, even if it’s only an analogy, there is a lot to learn from it. It says a lot about the pervasiveness of traditions within a society or an organization. It shows how we use the excuse of “it is how we always did”, "just keep doing as it was done earlier" to avoid trying new things and branching out in new directions.

Traditions are a part of every society and organization. They drive the society, organizations and people to the success and help to achieve higher goals, but if we keep following what we had done till now, if we forget to look beyond the obvious, if we do not think out of the box & stop pursuing new ideas, then those traditions can also be detrimental to progress within us, our workplaces and society. In other words an attitude of “we’ve always done it this way” will no longer be a viable way to succeed. This is specially very important during these times of digital disruptions when the conventional competitive advantages are not the only differentiating factors, when the boundaries between the industries are getting blurred too fast and when industry giants, industry incumbents are challenged by the digitally born small companies or start-ups & digital giants.

 “If you always do what you’ve always done, you are going to get the same results.”

Simply put, proactively imagining and creating new things is a vital component in driving change and adapting to new environments. Sometimes things may not work out the way you expect. The success of innovation is largely affected by what you do, and how you do it, and that is why it’s very important to lead or manage innovation.

“When the winds of change blow, some people build walls and others build windmills.“

Moral of the story is.. foster and promote a culture of innovation within ourselves and in our workplace, making sure that we are developing a culture of creativity, ingenuity, experimental problem-solving & innovation within us as well as within our organizations. We shall constantly challenge ourselves to look at things from different point of view, with a new light, to keep questioning, to keep trying new way of doing things, and to continue striving for improvements and innovations.

Cheers!!!