Coaching Letter #216

On monkeys and pedestals

My dad in front of the WW2 Memorial in Gloucester, MA

Hello, I hope you are well, and thank you for subscribing to the Coaching Letter, you rock. Today is Memorial Day in the United States—honoring all those who have died in service of the country, in war or during peacetime. There is no one memorial to the fallen, obviously, but hundreds of memorials across the United States, to casualties of the Second World War, the Vietnam War, the Korean War, and so on, and to individual battles or tragedies, such as Pearl Harbor and Andersonville. Because of my husband's research, I have been to a very great number of these memorials, and they are universally sad, moving, and tragic. I am so sorry for all the loss that they represent, and have so much respect for those who have died.

This Coaching Letter is about a big idea that I’ve been obsessing over lately, but that has very old origins…

Once upon a time, a community of mice held a meeting to discuss how to deal with their enemy, the cat. The cat was swift, silent, and deadly, and the mice lived in constant fear of being pounced on at any moment. After much debate, one young mouse stood up and proposed a brilliant idea: "We should fasten a bell around the cat’s neck. That way, we will always hear it coming and have time to escape. The mice all cheered at the idea and applauded the cleverness of the suggestion. But then an older, wiser mouse asked: "That is indeed a clever plan—but who will bell the cat?

This fable is attributed to Aesop, who may or may not have been a real person who may or may not have been enslaved and who may or may not have lived in Greece in the 6th century BCE. There’s a more recent parable about a monkey and a pedestal that goes like this:

Let’s say you’re trying to teach a monkey how to recite Shakespeare while on a pedestal. How should you allocate your time and money between training the monkey and building the pedestal? The right answer, of course, is to spend zero time thinking about the pedestal. But I bet at least a couple of people will rush off and start building a really great pedestal first. Why? Because at some point the boss is going to pop by and ask for a status update—and you want to be able to show off something other than a long list of reasons why teaching a monkey to talk is really, really hard.

It’s from a blog post by Astro Teller of Google X, and, like the mice with the cat problem, it illustrates that what scuppers a really great project, idea, or strategy is often not a failure of logic or even skill, but an inability to execute on a mission-critical element.

It is worth pointing out that the monkey is not necessarily the mechanism. In other words, the monkey is not the core action that causes the desired outcome. Sometimes the hardest, most essential thing is enabling conditions—mission-critical supports, constraints, or relationships—without which the "real work" can’t happen at all. But those things are often hidden, unglamorous, or feel unrelated, so people ignore them and focus on the flashier stuff.

The monkey has several names, depending on the field you’re in: go/no go line, critical variable, mission-critical element, chokepoint, threshold condition, enabling condition. All of them indicate that without the monkey, nothing else really matters, because you can’t move forward in actually accomplishing the goal, although you can move forward in peripheral elements, like polishing the pedestal.

Many of these monkeys are gatekeepers. My husband has a talented and skilled student who also happens to be autistic—he is struggling to find a summer internship for which he is definitely qualified because he does not interview well (I’m not going to rant at the moment about how so often the interview process screens for the wrong things…). Or maybe you’d be a great doctor, but if you can’t pass organic chemistry then you’re not going to med school. Or you are a really gifted mathematician, but you won’t get the chance to be a great teacher unless you can organize and control a couple of dozen adolescents. Or maybe you’re set on being a fighter pilot, but your eyesight is just not good enough. These are the monkeys you have to get past in order to even get started.

There are latent monkeys—the ones that are waiting for you, and that you are frequently not prepared for even though you are warned about them. For example, I’ve read several accounts by doctors about how nothing prepares you for losing a patient. You know, especially if you work in oncology or as a trauma surgeon, that the chances are that not all of your patients will survive, but that is very different from the emotion elicited by the actual experience, and for some doctors, it is just too difficult and they move into another field. Or you know, because it was in the job description, that a new job entails a lot of travel, but if you cannot handle the grind of being on an airplane every few days, then all the benefits of the new position are not enough to overcome the travel monkey.

Then there are the monkeys that take you by surprise: the plot-twist monkeys. These are the ones that you don’t see coming. Here are some plot-twist monkeys that I’m dealing with or thinking about currently. Some monkeys are relational (like “making the ask”), others are belief-based (like expectations for student capacity), and some are systemic or structural (like task availability or system stability):

1. Making the ask. A lot of what we’re encouraging districts to work on right now is to enable teams of teachers to test “recipes” for core instructional practices (there’s a particular rationale for use of the recipe metaphor; you can read more about that in CL #190), because testing recipes is the lion’s share of the mechanism for instructional improvement. But the monkey is leaders (or coaches or department chairs, or…) actually ask teachers to try something and report back next week. No monkey, no mechanism; no mechanism, no change.

2. Beliefs about student capacity: If teachers don't believe students are capable of engaging with complex, grade-level tasks, then they will either not ask students to work on them, or they will scaffold them down so that they lose their cognitive demand. Mechanism: students working on appropriately challenging tasks; monkey: teacher expectations for what students can do. No monkey, a much less potent mechanism. A gutted mechanism, much less challenge. Little challenge, little learning.

3. Understanding of high-quality instruction: Many districts lack a clear, shared mental model of what equitable, adaptive instruction actually looks like. They may hire coaches, or implement new teacher evaluation plans, or build data teams into teachers’ schedules, or create a shiny new strategic plan, or… This one is a multi-purpose monkey. Without clarity on what good instruction looks like, interventions intended to improve instruction end up introducing more variation into the system, making results even more unpredictable. Without a clear model of good instruction, even well-meaning reforms increase noise, not signal.

4. Task design and selection: Even with good intentions, teachers struggle to consistently design or choose cognitively demanding, equitable tasks. I wrote about that in CL #213. And really, as I wrote in the post, asking teachers to design and select tasks is neither very efficient nor very effective--writing good tasks is really difficult, teachers aren’t trained to do it, it takes a long time that would be better spent improving instruction. Mechanism: providing students with high quality, appropriately challenging tasks; monkey: getting those tasks in the hands of teachers, or maybe better framed as getting leaders to take on getting high quality tasks in the hands of teachers as their problem to solve instead of expecting teachers to become expert designers on top of everything else.

5. Stability in the system: High teacher turnover, superintendent changeover, frequent changes in policy or guidelines or curriculum are issues in lots of places. I think that stability is generally underestimated as a condition or platform for system improvement; I also think that some leaders and school boards have a fantasy that they can hire their way to improvement. A really solid plan for instructional improvement depends, implicitly if not explicitly, on building capacity of the people in the system, and that stock takes time to build. You can’t create capacity if the people keep changing. And you can’t get better as a system if you keep hitting reset every time someone new walks in the door. And yet…

I’m aware that these monkeys are my monkeys in the sense that they are essential to the progress of projects that I am working on. But I also have my own monkeys. The mechanism for publishing a book is writing a book, and you’d think the monkey would be finding the time, but the monkey is actually using the time I do have to write something difficult (like a book chapter) and not something more fun to write (like a Coaching Letter). No monkey, no book-writing; no book-writing, no book. Being an effective consultant in service of more equitable experience for students involves working with leaders on a mechanism for improving instruction—and I have all sorts of knowledge, tools, and experience to help with this. The monkey, however, is being able to have a conversation with a leader about what they should or should not be doing without tipping over from being helpful expert to judgy pain-in-the-neck. No monkey, no relationship; no relationship, no work. Then there are my various fitness monkeys: finding time, staying injury-free, getting enough sleep, eating healthy…

The monkey-and-pedestal metaphor is useful shorthand: it gives you a way to talk about mission-critical variables without having to say “mission-critical variables,” which is a relief to everyone involved. It’s especially handy for planning conversations, because it prompts you to ask: Are we solving the hard part, or the easy part that looks productive? One tool that helps surface the hard parts early is the pre-mortem—see this HBR article by Gary Klein, who originated the method. The goal is to anticipate knowable monkeys before the project begins. But even with great planning, you’ll still encounter the plot-twist monkeys—the ones that show up uninvited and knock over your theory of action. As Mike Tyson is (brilliantly) credited with saying, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

This is why you should treat your theory of action as provisional. No matter how well you’ve thought it through, it’s almost certainly incomplete and may even be wrong. A great source on this is Amy Edmondson’s article in HBR on treating your strategy as a hypothsis. And for more, see Learning to Improve and The Strategy Playbook. Take time to unpack the assumptions baked into your theory. And then—critically—show it to the people closest to the work, especially those most affected by it. They’re the ones most likely to spot the monkey before it causes real damage.

It’s also useful to think about your pedestals: the things that may be necessary parts of the project, but are the easy parts that look productive, i.e., not the mechanism, nor the monkey, both of which deserve the majority of your time and attention. I think of the amount of time districts put into developing 5-year plans, compared with the energy they put into execution, or the resources that go into pull-out workshops for teachers compared with support for teacher collaboration around enactment, or the effort that goes into protocols for the various aspects of MTSS, compared with the need for guaranteeing that all students are provided with equitable and adaptive instruction in the regular classroom (AKA Tier 1 instruction). It’s not that these things aren’t important, it’s just that there are things that are more important, crucial, and difficult.

I hope this is helpful. As always, I’m always happy to hear your feedback, and let me know if there is anything else I can do for you. Best, Isobel