Tuesday, August 16, 2022 Newsletter
Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School and one of my favorite follows on Twitter, recently tweeted about a concept known as “the reverse salient”. He described it as “the technology or process that is holding back development of the whole system (like ⚡️ ︎car batteries did). Solving the salient unlocks change.”
Historian Thomas Hughes introduced the term in a famous 1983 book, Networks of Power, about the first 50 years of electrification. A reverse salient that held back electrification was the low voltage transmission distance of Edison’s direct-current (DC) generator. Edison made several incremental improvements, but the solution unlocking change was the innovation by others of the alternating-current (AC) system.
Mollick, needing little more than an emoji, gives a good modern example: electric car batteries. Without battery technology that could allow you to drive more than a few miles between charges, you can’t produce a commercially viable car people would want.
If you want to unlock a new technology, identify the reverse salient (find the bottleneck) and solve for that.
When I read this, I immediately saw the relationship to “monkeys and pedestals”, a mental model for approaching problems, which I learned about from Astro Teller, the CEO of X, Google’s innovation hub.
To understand monkeys and pedestals, imagine that you’re trying to teach a monkey to juggle flaming torches while it stands on a pedestal in the town square. Two tasks are competing for your money, time, and attention: training the monkey and building the pedestal.
One is a possibly intractable obstacle. And the other is building the pedestal.
The bottleneck, the hard thing, is getting the monkey to juggle those flaming torches. The monkeys in the monkeys and pedestals mental model are, of course, reverse salients.
Simply put, there is no point in building pedestals if you can’t solve for the monkey. Afterall, why build a scale model of a super-sleek, futuristic electric car if you can’t figure out how get its battery to hold a charge long enough for anyone to use it?
Monkeys and pedestals tells us to attack the hard thing first because if we can’t solve for that there is really no point in doing the rest of the work. In fact, in project presentations at X, you’ll see #MONKEYFIRST all over the decks as a constant reminder to figure out what the bottlenecks are and to solve for those before building a bunch of pedestals.
Notice that this is the opposite of the way many projects are managed. How many times have you heard, “Let’s tackle the low hanging fruit first.”?
Low hanging fruit is, by definition, pedestal building, offering the illusion of progress rather than any real ground gained toward reaching a goal. You already know you can build a pedestal, or buy one on Amazon, or turn a milk crate upside down. Building pedestals means you are spending time, money, and other resources on things that get you no closer to figuring out whether you can achieve what it is you are striving for.
Making matters worse, if you tackle the low hanging fruit first, it takes you longer to figure out whether you can solve for the reverse salient, whether you can train the monkey. And the longer it takes you to figure that out, the longer you pursue a project that may not be worthwhile. Meanwhile, you’re pouring resources into the project, cementing a commitment that becomes harder to abandon and easier to justify continuing.
Once you start dumping resources into a project or pursuit, the fear of having wasted those resources if you abandon course make it hard to walk away. That is why building pedestals before you tackle the monkey is so dangerous. Every dollar or minute that you spend addressing the low hanging fruit creates friction to quitting when you discover that you can’t actually resolve the bottlenecks.
Tackling the hard thing first gets you to “no” faster. And the faster you figure out the monkey is untrainable, the less time and money and effort you have sunk into the project, making it easier to quit when the time is right.
Astro Teller’s approach is a nice complement to what Ethan Mollick is saying. Mollick says you can make the most consequential contribution to a system by solving the reverse salient. Teller takes that further, saying that you should identify that bottleneck when you’re approaching any project and solve for that first, because none of the other stuff matters if you don’t do that.
Monkeys and pedestals boil down to some very good advice:
Figure out the hard thing first.
Try to solve that as quickly as possible.
Beware of false progress.