Add the Hundredth Monkey

Well here is how it goes..

... the instantaneous, paranormal spreading of an idea or ability to the remainder of a population once a certain portion of that population has heard of the new idea or learned the new ability.

In the original story, it happened when they added the hundredth monkey to the study group, thus giving rise to "the hundredth monkey effect".

How did I come to this.. I was wondering why I had added the book "Supernature" to my wishlist. There was very little available about the book but a lot about its author Lyall Watson. Apparent in his book, Lifetide (1979), Watson made what was believed to be the first published use of the term "hundredth monkey". Here is an excerpt his obituary (!!!) in telegraph...

This phenomenon referred to a sudden spontaneous and mysterious leap of consciousness achieved when an allegedly "critical mass" point is reached. Watson was writing about several studies done in the 1960s by Japanese primatologists of Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata).

Claiming that the scientists were "reluctant to publish [the whole story] for fear of ridicule", Watson wrote that he had to "gather the rest of the story from personal anecdotes and bits of folklore among primate researchers, because most of them are still not quite sure what happened".

Watson's tale was that an unspecified number of monkeys on the Japanese island of Koshima were washing sweet potatoes in the sea. But the addition of a further monkey – the so-called hundredth – apparently carried the number across some sort of threshold, pushing it through a kind of critical mass, because by evening almost every monkey was doing it. Moreover the habit seems to have jumped natural barriers and to have appeared spontaneously in monkey colonies on other islands and on the mainland.

Wonderful story and I want to believe it. And it has so many implications in the homo sapien world. But before I get into that, let me tell you what makes me want to believe in this theory. I remember a wonderful video of a folk of birds reacting to an predator attack (see sort sol in wiki) and kept wondering at how the decisions are made in such large collection of animals. Of course I would love to believe in my childhood fantasies. That there is always a leader who takes wise decisions as in "the lion king" or "the jungle book". But if you have ever wondered about decision making in bees, ants or fishes, you would have come across some theory or other about how the Collective Animal Behaviour takes shape. Consider this .. (an excerpt from wiki)

The fish did this by a simple quorum rule such that individuals watched the decisions of others before making their own decisions. This technique generally resulted in the 'correct' decision but occasionally cascaded into the 'incorrect' decision. In addition, as the group size increased, the fish made more accurate decisions in following the more attractive fish model.Consensus decision-making, a form of collective intelligence, thus effectively uses information from multiple sources to generally reach the correct conclusion.

If you agreed then so far so good, but what about humans.. Well I tend to believe it is not too different. It is said man uses 10% of his brain but sadly the percentage of men who use their brains is much lesser. George Orwell's "Animal Farm" was not in a fantasy land. Communist USSR and Hitler's propaganda is not too far off in history to be waived off. People do use their head and make decisions. But the type of things they make decision about varies and open to manipulation. On my own I should hardly be in a position to decide whether India should nuke its irksome neighbour but I do and I believe it is a lot of opinions working uniquely in my head to give a bias. Experiments in social psychology, clearly found out that most people are almost hard wired to take orders, to stick to social norms and follow the ruts laid out in front of them.

There is a lot study on this topic. You may want to have a look at a book called "The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations" by James Surowiecki. I am sure many of you have read "Wikinomics" by Don Tapscott. You may want to take look at it again keeping the Hundredth Monkey effect in your mind.

I know of no such studies in organisation behaviour domain. But this certain has its implications especially for the Training and Development functions. Should you find out the critical mass you need for technical skills in your talent pool? There have been so many COEs (Center of Excellence) I have seen over the past few years but a few successful ones have spawned off successful business offerings. Is there a pattern? Should you ensure that there are enough people learning and using the next fad tech world, so that you can expect to reap its benefits for the organisation.

I have seen a good number of quality initiatives. In case of six sigma initiatives, people are trained to be a part of the initiative and awarded belts (green, black and so on..) But is there any thought about how many of my shop floor workers need to be trained and certified.

Ever wondered how may minds must your marketing campaign influence to reach that critical mass...

May be it is the hundredth...