Who's Got the Monkey?

Imagine a colleague coming up to you as you're heading into a meeting. They say, "We've got a little problem," then proceed to give you the details. You know enough to be involved, but not enough to make decisions or offer any advice on the fly, so you reply, "I've got to be somewhere right now, but let me think about it."

Common enough scenario, right? But let's take a closer look at what just happened. Your colleague had a problem. Now you have the problem.

Back in the 1980's, I was the communications manager for the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce. I was one of a dozen of us managers, all young, all on this lowly, but respectable rung of our career ladders. One day, the big boss presented us all with copies of "Honkin'" Bill Onken's classic book on business management Managing Management Time, and it changed my life.

At the center of the book was Onken's famous monkey-on-the-back analogy. As managers, he asserted, we were hired primarily to develop and implement new ideas and initiatives. This is what would determine whether or not a promotion was in our future. The challenge was finding the "discretionary" time to do this. Most managers spend their days dealing with overflowing inboxes (in those days, we literally had inboxes on our desks). The secret was delegating. He advised managers to consider each item in our inbox as a monkey that someone was attempting to put on our back and a good manager's first thought should be to figure out how to get that monkey onto someone else's back. And that happened by delegating.

The classic way to delegate your monkey is to a subordinate, say, an assistant manager or secretary. You could also delegate to a peer as happened in the example at the top of this post. Skilled delegators could even delegate monkeys upward to their superiors. What you had left was the stuff that you had to do yourself, which was always a fraction of what had started off in your inbox. And that, ideally, left you that precious discretionary time for developing and implementing new ideas and initiatives.

As educators, our role obviously differs from that of a business manager, but as people who are often overwhelmed by our "inboxes" the lesson about monkeys still applies. If you work in a larger institution, you may have subordinates, peers, and superiors. You might want to consider if you have any monkeys to pass along. I've found that sometimes I can delegate to parents, although most of the time, I use Onken's advice to avoid taking on their monkeys in the first place. Parent complaints are usually something I have to deal with, but when a parent comes to me with a "suggestion" or "idea" for the school, my first thought, without any consideration of its merits, is to say something like, "That's great. Keep me in the loop!" I like to think Bill Onken would be proud. In two short sentences, I keep that monkey where it belongs, on their back. Either they take that monkey and run with it, or, it dies because they stopped feeding it. Our school's magnificent greenhouse became reality through this very process.

But the reality is that most of us, most of the time, have no one to whom we can delegate. Or do we?

What about the children?

Obviously, there are many monkeys that aren't appropriate for them to carry, but quite often they don't even see our monkeys as monkeys at all, but rather the opportunity to engage with life itself. For instance, some of my best moments as a teacher result from me saying to the room something like, "She wants the red ball and he wants the red ball, but we only have one red ball. I don't know what to do." Someone, usually everyone, always takes up that monkey. 

"They could share it."

"They could take turns."

"He can have it for four bounces, then she can have it for four bounces."

I've written before about how it would often be weeks between the arrival of boxes of school supplies and finding the time to unpack it all and store it away. That is, until I had the epiphany that I could delegate it to the kids, who didn't see it as a monkey at all, but rather a meaningful real world project. And as they unpacked, they not only sorted, but did much of my curriculum planning for the weeks ahead. "Teacher Tom, I want to paint with these new brushes tomorrow."

We once received unassembled playground furniture that would have required me to sacrifice at least a weekend morning. That is, until I realized that I could just put the boxes on the work bench for the children to assemble over the course of a week. All the adults had to do was keep track of all the little pieces and give each screw an extra turn at the end to make sure it was tight.

I don't plan circle time. I just turn that monkey over to the kids by saying, "What do we need to talk about?"

I leave much of the planning for the last day of school, or really any other community celebration, to the kids.

I've even sometimes turned "assessments" over the children, letting them tell me what they're good and what they want to get better at.

Indeed, in a play-based setting, the entire "curriculum" is a troop of monkeys that has been turned over to the children. And let me tell you, they know the difference between a real monkey and some make-work toy monkey.

Once you get in the habit of thinking about monkeys, you see them everywhere. You find yourself asking, "Who's got the monkey?" Some monkeys are always going to be yours to feed and care for, but at any given moment, we're all carrying around monkeys that would be better served elsewhere. It's time to move them along.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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