The Gorilla Experiment (and a petty feud about a fridge)

Let me share with you an article I once read about a (hypothetical?) experiment conducted on a group of gorillas, and how it applies to organizations everywhere.

Say you have 5 gorillas in a cage. Dangling up high is a bunch of bananas, and underneath the bananas is a ladder. One gorilla proceeds to climb the ladder, and the entire group is suddenly sprayed with cold water from a firehouse. Each time a gorilla attempts to climb the ladder, they get doused with cold water, until the group attacks whoever tries to climb up in order to avoid being sprayed.

Replace a single gorilla with a new one. Hungry, it goes for the bananas but is shocked to be attacked by the rest of the group. Replace a second gorilla, and when it climbs the ladder, the same thing happens. Eventually the remaining three are replaced, and even though the spraying has stopped, the behavior continues. Replace them continually until, generations later, they just do it because "That's the way it's always been."

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Now let's teleport for a minute to my place of work, a city government, where I experienced this very same phenomenon as a "new gorilla". The only difference is, my fellow new gorillas and I are independent enough to not join in with the beating. But oh, what a petty, petty thing I'm going to tell you about.

There are 11 of us in my project group at work, including the project manager whom I shall call... Vladimir (it's my story, I have my rights). Right next to our area is another bureau, which I shall call Bureau B. In between our offices is a lunch room that is used by Bureau B employees. Ever since I started working here six years ago, Bureau B people have been very nice to us new gorillas, all hired circa 1999-2000 (the oldies don't go in there, reason to come later). They offer us doughnuts and pastries (though we rarely ever take any), let us chip in for coffee, and use the fridge and sink.

Close to the lunch room are two refrigerators that "belong" to my group. One of them we each chipped in $20 for and purchased cheap at a junk yard, and the other one was donated by boss Vladimir. Now whenever you "donate" something, it means you've given it to the City and it is then considered public property. Just like the whole building is, and almost everything in it, including office furniture and computer software.

The trouble started when a few months ago, one of my co-workers offered a single Bureau B person the use of our fridge. Before we knew it, a whole bunch of them joined in, and we were running out of room. I personally felt like they had trespassed a little bit. But Vladimir, oh, he was ranting -- because of a decade-old feud. See, one morning some ten years ago, there was a bunch of bagels in the lunch room which, at the time I suppose, was for Bureau B consumption only. One of my co-workers, whom I shall call Igor, brought his own bagel for breakfast. A Bureau B person saw Igor with his bagel, assumed he took one of theirs, and raised a stink about it. Vladimir was royally ticked, and that started the rift. Take note, this was circa 1995.

Fast forward to the year 2000, with 7 new gorillas. Two of the old gorillas warned us to avoid using the lunch room because of a lingering, hush-hush animosity. But it's now 2005, and Bureau B people have only ever been so nice to us. Unbelievably though, just this month, Vladimir ranted about their using our fridge, even muttering, "If they're gonna raise a stink about a bagel...." LOL! He doesn't realize that there's a whole new generation of people in that bureau who don't have a clue about the ten-year-old squabble. And besides the fridge, he's also territorial about the use of tables and rooms in our area. Which I don't understand because, hey, it's city property. We work in a public building! He's living in the past, an old gorilla angry about being sprayed. Needless to say, us newer folks are perplexed by his behavior. We're supposed to be more mature than that.

Unfortunately, this kind of mindset is not unique to Vladmir but is common among the old gorillas at work, and as it is with the fridge, so it goes with bureau projects and personnel alike. It all just spills over. Personal politics and counter-productive territorial behavior run rampant. Us younger ones, who've come from private companies and know what "performance-based", "productivity", and "customer service" mean in the outside world, are often frustrated with the continual ego-fest.

Vladimir might be retiring in a year or two, so let's see what happens when a new manager steps in. If another old gorilla gets promoted though, we can expect more of the Same Old Ways. IMO, that would be tragic (and yet another reason for me to leave).

Lastly, who when asked a reasonable question would feel comfortable saying, like a clueless moron, that "That's the way it's always been"? There's a reason behind every process, and if you don't know what it is, you're driving blind. Unfortunately, that happens too often in a lot of places. It would be so much better to hear a trite yet sincere, "I'll get back to you on that."