Monkey business, the phrase that stands for silly or mischievous behaviour, must have struck with Netflix engineers when they designed a system to play mischief with their own network system. They called it Chaos Monkey.  Chaos Monkey, Netflix’s resiliency tool  is responsible for randomly terminating instances in the network to ensure that engineers implement their services to be resilient to instance failures. Chaos Monkey, a successful tool available now since 2010 is based on the concept of Chaos Engineering.

Chaos Engineering is a disciplined approach to identify failures before they become outages. By proactively testing how a system responds to failure conditions, you can identify and fix failures before they become public facing outages. Chaos Engineering lets you validate what you think will happen with what is actually happening in your systems. By performing the smallest possible experiments you can measure, you’re able to “break things on purpose” in order to learn how to build more resilient systems.

Chaos Monkey, monkey-like randomness and mischief and the plastic net that covers grapevines are instances of interventions to prevent the systems and farming from failure, especially from monkey-like, random attacks.  Interventions to bring in behaviour change have a similar effect, prevention from wavering away from the goal.

Our work life is replete with randomness, activities and distractions that derail our performance. Most of these activities are not well defined but are as random and mischief as a monkey that destroys the productivity crop from time to time. Reasons like work overload, fatigue, communication gap with the boss, non clarity in the goal and expectation, non cohesive team etc.  could deviate from active performance. Not just external factors, individual habits and way of thinking can also be a deterrent to optimal performance. These external and internal causes and aberrations can be seen as monkeys attacking the system and can be tackled through interventions. In this Habits for Forward Thinking article, let me bring your attention to psychological interventions that help one achieve goals, personal and professional.

What are interventions? Psychological interventions are any set of strategies that are used to change behaviors, emotions, or cognitions to produce a personal change leading to higher functional results.

Interventions in Sports:

Sports personalities are the ultimate example of human level performances. Here is an excerpt from a research paper of Interventions in Sports performance to help you understand the significance of interventions:  

“Psychological skills training” is a term that “was coined to describe techniques and strategies designed to teach or enhance mental skills that facilitate performance and a positive approach to sport competition”

The paper talks about, ‘When researchers and practitioners are developing psychological skills training interventions it is important that they make a clear distinction between psychological qualities, psychological skills, and psychological strategies. “Psychological qualities” are the characteristics or attributes that facilitate optimal performance, and they can be experienced to varying degrees (e.g., high and low self-confidence; Holland, Woodcock, Cumming, & Duda, 2010). “Psychological skills” involve the ability to regulate psychological qualities, such as the ability to maintain self-confidence (Holland et al., 2010; Vealey, 1988). “Psychological strategies” are the interventions or the methods used to purposefully teach those psychological skills and qualities (e.g., thought control; Vealey, 1988).

The psychological techniques that have been most widely used by sport psychology practitioners, and the focus of most intervention research, are imagery, goal-setting, thought management and self-talk, and physical relaxation.

Interventions in Education:

Schools, especially ones with a focus on the mental well being of students, have a team of special educators to identify, intervene and nurture students for their optimal performance. Interventions are designed to help students that have a slower learning process than their batchmates. Interventions are also designed to make bright, gifted kids in the class to outperform his or her own achievements. Interventions are not necessarily only meant for corrections in behaviour, they are also designed to bring enhancement in performance.

Interventions in Worklife:

Interventions, as the name suggests, is a set of sequenced and planned actions or events intended to help the organization exercise its effectiveness. Intervention purposely disrupt the status quo. As quoted in a note from McKinsey, “Many L&D functions embrace a framework known as “70:20:10,” in which 70 percent of learning takes place on the job, 20 percent through interaction and collaboration, and 10 percent through formal-learning interventions. These percentages are general guidelines and vary by industry and organization. Today, L&D leaders must design and implement interventions that support informal learning, including coaching and mentoring, on-the-job instruction, apprenticeships, leadership shadowing, action-based learning, on-demand access to digital learning, and lunch-and-learn sessions. Social technologies play a growing role in connecting experts and creating and sharing knowledge.”

At corporate levels, interventions can be designed to work at the organization level for example- declaring a 3 day long weekend to battle fatigue of the organisation or interventions can be personalised at an individual level like a planned conversation session between two people affecting each other’s performance in a negative way. To adopt diversity and inclusion, L&D teams are strategizing interventions to bring required behaviour change at a cultural level.

Interventions need not be addressed only by psychologists. Team leaders, managers, human resources team, anyone willing to understand the problem can identify the need for intervention. You and I, any individual, if feeling stuck in a situation can look for intervention as a measure to step out.

There is a word of caution. Too much intervention or bad timing or a bad strategy of intervention can be harmful. In such cases, one must remember, sometimes doing nothing is an intervention too. There is a word for overdose of intervention- iatrogenics– when a treatment causes more harm than benefit. As iatros means healer in Greek, the word means “caused by the healer” or “brought by the healer.”  Healer, in this sense, need not mean doctor, but anyone intervening to solve a problem.

It is in human nature to react to a situation and take action. If the net outcome result of intervening is negative, then one must refrain from intervening. Doing nothing in some cases to keep a net positive result is an intervention too. At the same time, too much intervention is almost like putting a thick black cover instead of a net to protect the grape farms from monkeys. Thick cover will stunt the growth by stopping sunlight and air and thus kill the plants, so does wrong intervention strategy.  

Planning and designing interventions are like preparing to manage monkey menace. Some are small, some are big, some come as individuals and some come as barrels. Interventions, like the net, or chaos monkey of Netflix, prepare to become resilient and let the growth prosper, before the menace becomes the outage.

It is not a monkey business to manage monkey menace.