PLEASE NOTE: There are several videos on Youtube that highlight the parable of the five monkeys and while this experiment is NOT based on actual research the principles extracted from the fable are still useful.
Most people or organizations who use this parable point to Harry Harlow the American psychologist best known for his maternal-separation and social isolation experiments on rhesus monkeys as the source for but the parable can more than likely attributed to the work of Gordon R. Stephenson:
“Stephenson (1967) trained adult male and female rhesus monkeys to avoid manipulating an object and then placed individual naïve animals in a cage with a trained individual of the same age and sex and the object in question. In one case, a trained male actually pulled his naïve partner away from the previously punished manipulandum during their period of interaction, whereas the other two trained males exhibited what were described as “threat facial expressions while in a fear posture” when a naïve animal approached the manipulandum. When placed alone in the cage with the novel object, naïve males that had been paired with trained males showed greatly reduced manipulation of the training object in comparison with controls. Unfortunately, training and testing were not carried out using a discrimination procedure so the nature of the transmitted information cannot be determined, but the data are of considerable interest.”
Sources:
Stephenson, G. R. (1967). Cultural acquisition of a specific learned response among rhesus monkeys. In: Starek, D., Schneider, R., and Kuhn, H. J. (eds.), Progress in Primatology, Stuttgart: Fischer, pp. 279-288.
Mentioned in: Galef, B. G., Jr. (1976). Social Transmission of Acquired Behavior: A Discussion of Tradition and Social Learning in Vertebrates. In: Rosenblatt, J.S., Hinde, R.A., Shaw, E. and Beer, C. (eds.), Advances in the study of behavior, Vol. 6, New York: Academic Press, pp. 87-88:
“Toxic culture is like carbon monoxide: you don’t see or smell it but you wake up dead! Senior pastors do a lot of good things, but they fail to understand the impact of the existing organizational culture on their new, exciting vision for the church. It is like changing the engine on a sports car to make it faster, but it’s spinning its wheels in the mud. Or to use a different metaphor, they try to transplant a heart into a patient whose body rejected the foreign organ. No matter how perfect the new heart is, the patient had no chance at all unless the body accepted it.
Culture — not vision or strategy — is the most powerful factor in any organization. It determines the receptivity of staff and volunteers to new ideas, unleashes or dampens creativity, builds or erodes enthusiasm, and creates a sense of pride or deep discouragement about working or being involved there.”
Chand also recommends forming an informal group to examine these and related questions. Identifying just how toxic your organization culture is a crucial first step, but you will still need to create the circumstances that will bring about the changes needed to move your organization culture to a better place. Unfortunately, this takes time and if an organization’s competitive advantage is its small size and ability to respond to new opportunities then a toxic culture will neutralize this competitive advantage. Furthermore, a toxic resistance to change may mean that it is too late for this particular organization. Seth Godin the author of Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us encourages leaders to recognize when it is too late and it is time to move on.
This can be a very tough pill to swallow for the people within the organization, but we all know it is often much more cost effective to build from scratch than it is to renovate. We are seeing the demise of many organizations across many industries so before we blame the economy, market, government or other external factors perhaps we need to take a closer look at the organization itself and, in particular, its culture.
The solution to this problem is to not let the culture get to the point where it is toxic. This requires balance of compassion, character, strength of conviction and sound leadership skills. Unfortunately, as Edwin H. Friedman points out in his book A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, there is a severe shortage of character and nerve in our society. In a rapidly changing world that is being projected forward by one disruptive innovation after another the difference between an organization surviving or thriving may be this strength of leadership and the ability to foster the circumstances that contribute to a strong, vibrant culture that motivates people to collaborate, serve and be and do their very best. What type of culture do you have in your organization and what are you doing about it?
When you are working hard to change your organization it doesn’t take long to realize:
culture triumphs vision.
Michael Hyatt provides the following six recommendations for changing the culture in your organization:
Become aware of the culture.
Assess your current culture.
Envision a new culture.
Share the vision with everyone.
Get alignment from your leadership team.
Model the culture you want to create.
You will find variations of this list in most change and leadership literature. While the whole blog post is well worth reading I am particularly encouraged by Hyatt using Ghandi’s famous saying,
Be the change you want to see in the world.
Hyatt also reminds us that we don’t need to be in an executive suite to bring about this type of change. We can change the culture in our own department or unit and impact the entire organization in the process.
When you consider a video like Socialnomics 2011 you must acknowledge that the media component of this social media phenomena we are experiencing is every bit as important and perhaps even a prerequisite for the social aspect of this revolution. With Youtube ranked as number one search engine with the under eighteen year old population and the number two search engine overall, there very little room for dispute that we are living in a media dominated culture. This is much more than just entertainment when you consider that the protein causing AIDS in rhesus monkeys that hadn’t been solved for 15 years was finally solved by Foldit, a multiplayer online game that challenges players from across the world to solve difficult protein-structure prediction problems. Media plays an extremely important role in the all of our lives and especially the lives of our youth.
So what is the best way for our educational systems and in particular high education to address this phenomena? There are three primary options that are being are currently being considered or implemented:
Do nothing
Offer a specialized Media/Visual Arts program
Embed media into all programs
The first option “Do nothing” is by far the most popular option in higher education and is characterized by the “Turn Off Cell Phones” signs that are posted at entrances of many classrooms and labs. The option is further reinforced by the faculty preventing students from using laptops or tablets to take notes in their classrooms. The advantages of this option is that there are several hundred years of tradition in the lecture structure that was foundational to the first universities. An additional advantage is that this option requires virtually no professional development or support–faculty simply pass on this long standing tradition. The disadvantages are that while this method represents the primary form of instruction in higher education there is a growing body of research and evidence to show that it is not very effective. The research shows that at best the lecture method allows for information transfer but the lack of engagement and significance prevent any aspect of deeper learning.
The second option, a specialized or dedicated Media/Visual Arts program is the second most popular option in higher education and will usually be part of either a Fine Arts, Graphic Arts or Communications program that will include but not be limited to: digital art & design, film studies, computer animation, game art and development and web design and development. The following video highlights Full Sail University which offers arguably one of North America’s best programs:
http://youtu.be/HNLgbqDxBWU
The advantages of programs like Full Sail or the more generic programs like Fine Arts or Graphic Design programs you will find at many colleges, universities or even trade schools is that students receive very specialized instruction and training. The Fine Arts programs at universities will offer more of the theoretical or foundational aspects of the discipline while the polytechnics offer the pragmatic instruction that deals with instruction in the software and related tools required in the discipline. Students are able to go from these programs to work in very specialized fields. The disadvantages of these programs is that they are generally very small and only prepare limited numbers of student to create media. These programs are very costly to run because they required very specialized software, hardware and support. Perhaps one of the most limiting aspects of this option is that so few people are actually empowered to create media.
The third options is to embed media creation into all programs. The is by far the least popular options and perhaps the most challenging option to realize. The biggest challenge in realizing this option is the challenge of changing a culture. Up until the emergence of Youtube and the popularity of media on the Internet the notion of embedding media into all programs within a university or college curriculum would be fool-hardy. In the pre-Youtube days one would need to employ a highly trained and skilled videographer or media specialist to shoot the video who would then rely on extremely expensive equipment to provide the necessary post production to create an acceptable product–and we haven’t even discussed the challenges in distributing this type of content.
With multiple pixel cameras on most cell phones today and HD video capability on smartphones and Digital SLRs, the ability to shoot extremely high quality images and video is within the grasp of most people. When you combine this with software tools like Garageband, iMovie, Final Cut Pro/Express and the whole compliment of Adobe products the post production side of creating rich media is also within reach of most people. Youtube, Vimeo and many other sites provide the distribution channel for media which means the creation and distribution of rich media is within the grasp of anyone with a smartphone, iPad, computer and the internet. One could argue this combination of pre and post production technology and the ubiquitous nature of the internet will have a similar impact on communication as Guttenburg’s printing press had upon the world centuries ago.
This takes us back to the challenge of culture. As was the case in Guttenburg’s time, change is difficult. It took almost 75 years for the printing press to begin have an impact the world. Fortunately, in this day and age technological change happens much more rapidly but most people are still relatively slow to react and the academy is the slowest of all institutions to embrace this type of change. Youtube was founded in the spring of 2005 and it wasn’t until the fall of 2006 when Google purchased it that the video sharing site started to have a significant impact. By 2008 Google had fully established itself as a media phenomena and the youth of the world started to see youtube as the first source of information and as an outlet for their creativity. While most youth embrace the creative options that their smart phones, iPads, digital SLRs and the internet provide most faculty still see youtube and the internet for the most part from the perspective of consumption rather then creation.
Communication in higher education is still viewed primarily as the written and spoken word. Video, audio and all other forms of communication are still viewed as being beyond the reach of the average individual. But this isn’t he case. The following video was created using iMovie; the sound track was recorded using a USB microphone plugged into a laptop and some of the picture were taken using a smart phone.
This two minute clip conveys a message that would take more than a thousand words to describe. Media can be used to engage students, to provide a context for new information, and to to make our learning environment more significant. More importantly we are at a point in the development of technology and the internet where the creation of media by all students must become part of all of our programs. We live in a media rich world and if we are truly preparing our students for the world of tomorrow then we have the responsibility to learn how to create media ourselves so that we can help our students to fully utilize media as a communication tool. We would be wise to head John Dewey’s warning:
If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.
Concordia University has an opportunity through the Learning Portfolio initiative to provide a way for our students to demonstrate their ability to communicate through written and spoken word and through all aspects of media. Concordia faculty will also have an opportunity develop their media skills through digital story telling and Pecha-Kucha workshops as well as working with their colleagues on the institutional website and other media projects. Concordia has an opportunity to take a leadership role in incorporating media into everything that we do, and when we do this, we can proudly state and demonstrate that our graduates will be recognized nationally and internationally for their knowledge, skill, integrity, and wisdom.
points out that culture not only trumps vision but once you understand that it is the most powerful factor in an organization that new shinny vision will not be realized until steps are taken to bring about cultural change.
encourages leaders to recognize when it is too late and it is time to move on.
, there is a severe shortage of character and nerve in our society. In a rapidly changing world that is being projected forward by one disruptive innovation after another the difference between an organization surviving or thriving may be this strength of leadership and the ability to foster the circumstances that contribute to a strong, vibrant culture that motivates people to collaborate, serve and be and do their very best. What type of culture do you have in your organization and what are you doing about it?
