Concept
Monkeys and Pedestals
Monkeys and pedestals is a rule Annie Duke takes from Astro Teller in Quit: in an ambitious project, tackle the hardest and most uncertain part (the monkey) first, and leave the easy part that shows progress (the pedestal) for later.
The image comes from Astro Teller, who heads X, Alphabet's lab for long-shot projects: if you want a monkey reciting Shakespeare on a pedestal, the pedestal is easy to build but tells you nothing about whether the monkey can be trained. Working on the monkey first means that if the project is impossible, you find out early and cheaply. Duke's addition is to explain why pedestal work is so tempting. It is tangible, it reports well, and because every pedestal built becomes another reason to keep going, it quietly raises the cost of quitting. The monkey is usually not hard to name: for a new café, whether people walk down that street; for a new product, whether customers will pay. The monkey is also where good kill criteria come from, because once you know the hardest problem you can write in advance what result on it would make you stop.
A real-life example
A baklava producer in Gaziantep tests shelf life before starting on packaging or a website for selling fresh baklava in Germany. Across three test shipments the quality holds for nine days, too short for supermarkets, so the plan moves to frozen baklava before a single box is designed.
How to use it
- 1For each new project, write in one sentence the one thing that, if it cannot be done, makes everything else pointless.
- 2Find the pedestal work scheduled before the monkey in your plan, and move the monkey to the front.
- 3Report progress on the monkey separately, so that visible work cannot hide it.