{"id":4476,"date":"2015-02-23T14:50:30","date_gmt":"2015-02-23T22:50:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/3.209.169.194\/blogs\/paul\/?p=4476"},"modified":"2015-02-23T14:54:30","modified_gmt":"2015-02-23T22:54:30","slug":"monkeys-bananas-stifling-innovation-workplace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sqlskills.com\/blogs\/paul\/monkeys-bananas-stifling-innovation-workplace\/","title":{"rendered":"Monkeys and bananas: stifling innovation in the workplace"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The story I wrote for our SQLskills Insider newsletter on Monday last week resonated so well with people that I thought I&#8217;d publish it here on my blog too (which I only do rarely). I try to mix things up in the newsletter so it&#8217;s not all about SQL Server technical matters; people seem to really like career topics too. You can sign up for the bi-weekly newsletter <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sqlskills.com\/join-the-sqlskills-insider-community\/\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>\u00a0(and get all the 100 past issues too) &#8211; more than 12,000 people get it now!<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the story, from the newsletter section I call\u00a0<strong>Paul&#8217;s Ponderings<\/strong>. Enjoy!<\/p>\n<p>Last week Jonathan pointed me at an interesting story about a psychology experiment involving monkeys and bananas and the reinforcement of constrained, negative thinking. The experiment actually never happened, but the story is quite illustrative. You can see a graphic of the story here: <a href=\"http:\/\/i.stack.imgur.com\/MyQki.jpg\" target=\"_blank\">http:\/\/i.stack.imgur.com\/MyQki.jpg<\/a> (totally safe for work), and I\u2019ll paraphrase quickly below:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A group of monkeys are trained to know that if any one of them attempts to climb a stepladder with a banana at the top, cold water is sprayed on all of them (i.e. temptation is prevented by the spraying of cold water, so the group prevents any individual from trying to get the banana).<\/li>\n<li>When a new monkey is introduced, and tries to get the banana, all the other monkeys prevent it as they don\u2019t want to be sprayed with water. The new monkey learns that it can\u2019t get the banana.<\/li>\n<li>Eventually all the monkeys are replaced, and they all know not to try to get the banana, but none of them know why, as they\u2019d only been told not to get the banana by the others.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It\u2019s a really interesting story of how conditioning can become groupthink (even if the experiment didn&#8217;t actually happen).<\/p>\n<p>There are obvious parallels in human society, and specifically in the work environments of many of you reading this newsletter. Let me explain:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A new person (A) joins a team. The new person has a great idea for how to do something differently\/better, and everyone else on the team prevents them from expressing their opinion because that won\u2019t be allowed, it won\u2019t work, and\/or they could get into trouble (e.g. from an intransigent and influential boss\/architect\/senior developer).<\/li>\n<li>Eventually all the original people leave the team and it\u2019s only A and the people who joined the team after A that are left. They all have the ingrained knowledge that they can\u2019t try anything new, or try a specific technology because they won\u2019t be allowed to etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In other words, being constrained to incumbent technologies and methodologies becomes \u201cthe way it\u2019s done around here, because it\u2019s always been that way.\u201d It doesn&#8217;t matter if the wider world knows that\u2019s maybe not the best way to do it, the historical groupthink wins out.<\/p>\n<p>We see this with new clients over and over, and it can be really difficult to educate the client team as to different (usually better) ways of approaching a problem. Sometimes it\u2019s just one person who stymies all thoughts of innovation or change in the team, and sometimes it\u2019s the collective groupthink that does it.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, there was a client (years ago), that Kimberly actually \u201cfired\u201d because of this. One meeting was enough but she told her contact (\u201cthe management\u201d) that she\u2019d try again and meet again for a second session. In her post-mortem with management, her main quote was \u2013 your problems are more than technical (specifically person \u201cX\u201d) and until that\u2019s resolved, I can\u2019t help you.<\/p>\n<p>Here are some simple examples of ingrained behavior we&#8217;ve seen and corrected:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Always use <em>NOLOCK<\/em> to work around blocking and deadlocking problems (and then it\u2019s used everywhere, and no one even realizes the negatives)<\/li>\n<li>Only ever rebuild an index to remove fragmentation, without considering <em>FILLFACTOR<\/em>s or trying to reorganize rather than rebuild<\/li>\n<li>Always use a heap and never use a clustered index because heaps are faster<\/li>\n<li>When creating a primary key, always use a clustered index as that\u2019s the default so Microsoft must know that\u2019s always the right way to do it<\/li>\n<li>For each column that\u2019s used in a <em>WHERE<\/em> clause, create a single-column nonclustered index<\/li>\n<li>Always use <em>OPTION (RECOMPILE)<\/em> to prevent plans being put into the plan cache and taking precious memory away from the buffer pool<\/li>\n<li>Always use <em>sp_executesql<\/em> to put a plan into cache for ad hoc statements so that their plans get reused<\/li>\n<li>Always create one file per processor core for tempdb, because that was the Microsoft guidance for SQL Server 2000<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>As I hope you can see, these are all very blinkered (and in some cases downright wrong) views on a variety of SQL Server topics. There are cases when some of these are the right thing to do, but not ALL the time just because \u2018that\u2019s the way we do it here\u2019.<\/p>\n<p>Does this remind you of anywhere? Or of anyone?<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s a dangerous way for a team to work because it can lead to all kinds of problems (such as poor performance, failed disaster recovery, good people leaving the team, business failure) that can be extremely hard to fix unless someone takes a stand or someone from outside the team helps to break the impasse. And even then, it\u2019s a delicate process to provide education and slowly change the thinking of the team, or of that one person who dominates the team\u2019s thinking.<\/p>\n<p>Call to action: Consider the environment you work in and whether the situation described above is how your team operates. Are you the person to take the stand to try to change the groupthink? Do you do it or do you move on? Or are you the person who\u2019s unreasonably dominating the team\u2019s thinking? Do you allow yourself to be changed or continue in your intransigence? It\u2019s a difficult situation to recognize you\u2019re in, whatever your role is, and a hard choice to decide what to do about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The story I wrote for our SQLskills Insider newsletter on Monday last week resonated so well with people that I thought I&#8217;d publish it here on my blog too (which I only do rarely). I try to mix things up in the newsletter so it&#8217;s not all about SQL Server technical matters; people seem to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-career"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Monkeys and bananas: stifling innovation in the workplace - Paul S. Randal<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.sqlskills.com\/blogs\/paul\/monkeys-bananas-stifling-innovation-workplace\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Monkeys and bananas: stifling innovation in the workplace - Paul S. Randal\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The story I wrote for our SQLskills Insider newsletter on Monday last week resonated so well with people that I thought I&#8217;d publish it here on my blog too (which I only do rarely). 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