Surely We must be smarter than this? Lessons in Leadership from Monkeys

This great post got me really depressed this morning. It's all about a science experiment with monkeys, where they get soaked with cold water as soon as any monkey tries to climb a ladder in the cage that has a bunch of bananas placed on top. Before you know it, the monkeys are beating up anyone who tries and moreover, the new ones introduced to the cage quickly get beaten up too if trying to climb the ladder and join in the beating, even after the soaking with cold water has stopped.

It's a depressing tale of habit over initiative, settling with culture rather than asking the question why. I found it particularly depressing as I'm an idealist at heart and believe in people's ability to rise above stupidity (at least eventually!) and be smarter than that. I pray I'm not wrong, but this experiment sounds awfully like some bad workplaces I've come across in the past..

So the conclusion being that if you want culture change, you will have to do more than just tell people that's what you want.. if the Pavlovian conditioning is too strong you need something equally strong (if not stronger!) to balance it out, moreover something more than extrinsic motivation and then back it up with people leading the change themselves by being role models or like Gandhi famously said: Be the Change You Want to See in the World.