Picture five monkeys in a room. In the corner, there is a chair and hanging over the chair, a bunch of bananas.

Being monkeys they head straight for the chair but instead of getting a free banana, they get an icy cold shower of water, triggered by the experimenters in the next room. Surprised and probably a little put out, the monkeys nevertheless get the point - keep away from the corner and forget about the bananas. At this point the experimenters remove one monkey from the group and introduce another. The remaining four monkeys watch as their new companion makes for the corner of the room and then, knowing what’s coming next, they beat him up to stop him getting to the chair. As a learning experience it’s pretty effective. The new monkey decides that he’ll do without the bananas.

“Why do we do this? It’s how we do things here. It is our culture.”

The experimenters continue to remove and replace the monkeys and the game scene is played out over and over again. Finally, there are no monkeys left who have seen the original drenching but that doesn’t matter; the corner has now become a no-go zone. Avoiding a corner is now a rule of the group and everyone abides by it. Maybe one day a particularly presumptuous monkey will get around to asking why this rule exists. If he does, he’ll probably receive an answer that goes something like this: It’s how we do things here. In other words, it is our culture.

Look around. Unwritten rules, unspoken attitudes, history, stories, values, traditions, jokes, language, styles of dress and ways of speaking…

At one company I worked for everything was properly documented, written down and processed. A simple suggestion not to write every detail down was usually taken as an assault.
Another business did the exact opposite – virtually nothing was written down. When somebody suggested (for example) mapping out the key processes, others responded mostly with horror in their faces. “No, no, we will not have that here. We’re not a bank, we’re creative!” was the usual reaction.

According to one estimate, some 80 percent of new ideas are rejected. The monkey study says partly why that is. Once we know the reason it is much easier to act as an audacious monkey that can turn the company around. So if you feel like it, go ahead and start peeking into how things are done. You may find out bananas are left in the corner for no reason.
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Tomas Hajzler