Cargo Cult – why I never ask my 2-year-old for business advice*
* Mostly because he’s now 10.
“Yes, we’re all individuals” (a crowd, in perfect unison – Life of Brian)
Cargo Cult is more insidious and prevalent than The Frank Sinatra School of startup (the last post).
Richard Feynman popularised the term “Cargo Cult Science” to describe science that imitates the rituals of science without the substance underneath. He borrowed it from accounts of post-war Pacific islanders who copied the rituals they had seen military personnel perform before precious cargo arrived. They built imitation control towers, signalled and shuffled papers – repeating the motions in the hope that it would bring the cargo back again. They weren’t being stupid; they were reasoning carefully from the evidence they had. That’s what makes it dangerous: cargo-culting is what intelligent people do when they can see the ritual but not the mechanism.
A more homely example: I used to do Lego when I came home from work to help me cope with stress**. My 2-year-old son would come and ‘help’ enthusiastically. He’d see me sticking blocks together, looking at the instructions, and eventually some big impressive toy would appear. So he’d do the same. If the Lego was left unattended, he’d go over to it, put the instructions beside him and with a look of intense concentration start putting bricks together – only to get a somewhat random collection of bricks, not the car he expected on the front of the instructions. He’d get extremely frustrated. This is Cargo Cult: ritual without understanding. Copying what looks like the cause of success without knowing what actually made it work.
It’s not just toddlers and Pacific islanders. It’s something we’ve all encountered. Who hasn’t met a Cargo Cult manager at some point? But for founders, the unique pressures of being in charge, in unfamiliar situations and competing against a sea of positive PR noise from other founders together create the perfect trap. Two traps in fact. One created by you and the other handed to you by the people you rely on. As founders, we’re usually the ones falling into both of them.
The personal one is the temptation to do things because you think you should, not because you understand why you should and how it relates to what you’re doing. A founder’s job is translational: to understand what needs to be done and then work out which tools actually help build it. Implementing Agile doesn’t help you build the right thing in just the same way that having a ping-pong table does not equal great company culture. There are buzzwords that help you to keep up with the next thing, to be seen to be on top of things, to be at the cutting edge, to appear knowledgeable and to do the good things everyone is talking about. That’s not really building – personally, professionally or organisationally.
The second is how you take advice. I’ve written about why advice is dangerous; Cargo Cult is the mechanism. Advisers have less skin in the game: ‘good advice’ is an opinion for them and can be life or death for you. No one cares more about your business than you. Because you’re stressed, doing something new and at huge personal risk, the temptation to rely on advisers or employees who can talk a good game is huge. Their confidence feels real and gives you welcome comfort. But anyone with all the answers usually isn’t answering the questions you actually need answered – you can be very comfortable as your business heads off a cliff.
A simple example might be bringing in an employee from a top tech firm. They can either be someone who has seen what great really looks like and can help you implement it in your context. Or someone who can talk confidently about what great looks like but won’t be able to translate it into your business. Maybe it’s an employee who worked at a top tech firm from the start but was never involved in key decision making. Maybe it’s an adviser who can talk the startup talk, but with no hands-on experience. How are you going to know the difference between the Cargo Cult employee or advisor and the great one? A simple test: ask why something works, not what worked. The Cargo Cult answer recites the ritual, whilst the real one explains the mechanism, then asks about your context. Beyond that there’s really hard work for you to do, and no right answers from me. It’s a skill you need to work at: from building advisers who you get on with and can help you find great people, to establishing your own strong frame of reference in understanding what it is you’re doing and why, so you’re more resilient to bullshit.
Whenever someone copies the ritual without understanding the principle, that’s Cargo Cult. It is everywhere: from the Frank Sinatra School, to OKRs and Agile, to business models, to company culture, management and strategy. Hopefully the danger is clear – if you don’t fundamentally understand how these relate to what you do, you divorce yourself from reality, waste time, waste resources, and leave the success of what you’re trying to build to chance.
Cargo Cult sets you up for failure because it doesn’t engage deeply enough with reality. That’s why I’m suspicious of anyone telling a founder ‘this is how you do it’. Sometimes, if the circumstances are identical, they’re spot on. Most of the time there’s interpretation, translation and calibration involved, and that’s on you. Advice without work is just passing on rituals, not understanding. The book I’ve written is my attempt at the opposite: the what and the why in context, including the embarrassing stories from when I was a Cargo Cult founder myself – the ones I still don’t enjoy rereading. The point is to help founders think for themselves rather than accidentally inherit my rituals, or anyone else’s. Think of it as a Lego set with honest instructions: what you could build, what each piece is for, which builds collapsed, and why. You still have to put the bricks together yourself, before this metaphor gets stretched any further and itself breaks.
**Thank you Anna, my wife, for just letting me get on and supporting me through working stupidly hard and doing ridiculous solitary things to cope with the stress.