“The Monkey and the Pedestal” - mental model to solve complex problems. Read on to enhance your decision-making skills to succeed at work and in life.

Imagine that your task is to teach a monkey to sing while standing on to- be constructed pedestal in the village square. Two tasks are competing for your money, time, and attention: training the monkey and building the pedestal.

Which one will you do first – build the pedestal or train the monkey?

The right answer, of course, is to spend zero time thinking about the pedestal.

But, we are wired to break down a complex problem into smaller chunks and tackle the easy component first. How many times have you heard, “Let’s tackle the low-hanging fruit first.”?

Building a pedestal provides the illusion of progress rather than getting closer to solving the real problem. It is wrong to spend time and money building a pedestal, it is a sunk cost if you can’t train the monkey to sing.

But, if you succeed in training the monkey to sing first, building a pedestal is very easy or you can just turn a crate upside down in the village square.

The pressure to show progress means we end up prioritizing low-hanging fruit and spending a lot of time and money on easy tasks. The faster you figure out the monkey is untrainable, the lesser the sunk cost.

1.     Tackle the hard thing first
2.     Fail fast
3.     Be aware of false progress

What do you think?

Note: The monkey and the pedestal first appeared in Astro Teller’s talk at the 2016 WSJDLive conference. Astro Teller leads Google X moon shot projects.

Image Credit: Image Credit: DALL-E 2

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