Leadership Lesson: How to bring a monkey into a room and teach it to speak English
Seems no big deal? Here is a profound lesson.
How often do you find yourself in a room of 20–30 smart people trying to figure out a complex problem? How often have these discussions ended with a solution? Have you wondered what is so hard about it?
The answer is simple yet profound — Most people spent most of the time trying to solve the part of the problem that they know the solution for and NOT the real problem that needs to be solved.
And the monkey example is something one of my gurus told me, in this context. If you pull in 20+ people to figure out how to bring a monkey into a room to make it speak English, guess what topic takes the most time in the discussion — The part about bringing the monkey into the room. However, the real hard problem is to teach a monkey how to listen (given how their mind and body jumps so quickly) and how to speak, let alone speak the English language.
Possibly, the next time, we find ourselves in a similar situation, the question to ask is “ What is the real hardest problem in the situation?”.
