The Framework Google Uses to Solve Its Hardest Problems Can Work for Anyone. Here's What to Do. Really, it's about which problem to solve first.

You're trying to solve a big problem. Nothing seems to work.

Hold up! Before you waste more time, you should consider a problem-solving framework called "the monkey and the pedestal." It comes out of X, the innovation factory where Alphabet, Google's parent company, takes its most ambitious bets, and it will save you a lot of time.

Here's how it works.

Imagine getting a crazy assignment at work: You must teach a monkey to recite Shakespeare while standing on a pedestal. Now ask yourself: What's the first thing you should do?

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Maybe you say, "Build the pedestal!"

That sounds logical. The pedestal is what we call low-hanging fruit — the small, easy stuff that we love to tackle first, because it gives us a sense of progress. But that's the wrong answer.

"There is no point in building pedestals if you can't solve for the monkey," writes behavioral researcher Annie Duke, whom I first learned this from. Because, sure, you could build an amazing pedestal — but what's the point, if a monkey can't learn to recite Shakespeare on it?

In other words, the monkey and the pedestal are two different kinds of solutions:

The monkey is the pivotal part of any problem — and if you don't solve for the monkey, nothing else you do matters.

The pedestal is everything else you do to solve the problem — often because it's easier, less scary, or more obvious than the monkey.

Now here's our biggest obstacle: When we take on big projects, we often have no idea what the hardest part is! That's the point of this exercise. You must step back and ask yourself: What's my monkey?

Before you go hunting for yours, it's helpful to hear how other people found theirs. So here are a few examples.

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Astro Teller, the CEO of X, once wrote about an interesting example. His team tried turning seawater into carbon-neutral liquid fuel, which is a potential game-changer of an idea. But before they spent too much time on it, they asked themselves: What's the monkey here?

You might think it's the technology that turns seawater into fuel, because that sounds hard. Surprisingly, it's not. The tech is "relatively straightforward," Teller writes, which makes it the pedestal. Instead, the monkey was this: Can seawater fuel be made cheap enough for people to buy it? Because if that's not possible, there's no point in developing the technology.

Ultimately, X realized the answer was no: The economics of the concept didn't work. So it killed the project.

Here's another example, on a smaller scale: I was recently talking with an entrepreneur named Stephanie, who cofounded a food brand with her cousin. It's gone OK, but not as great as she hoped, so she's been exploring a pivot — doing endless research, calling many experts, and stressing herself out.

We spent 30 minutes talking through her ideas. Then she revealed something: Her cousin has a different idea for a pivot, which Stephanie disagrees with. Because of this impasse, the cousins haven't discussed the pivot in months.

"Wait a second," I said. "Your cousin is the monkey."

Pivots may be hard, but they're also completely achievable — but Stephanie will never achieve a pivot until she's resolved the tension with her cousin. That must be solved before anything else.

Now you see: The monkey isn't always obvious. But it's always critical.

To find your monkey, I suggest asking this question: If I solved this problem and it was a great success, what major change would have gotten me there?

In other words, what bottleneck did you clear out? What critical hurdle did you overcome? That's your monkey.

You could build a million pedestals, but you won't be remembered or celebrated for them. Your success is dependent on training monkeys. So stop banging your head against the wall. Stop spending endless time on potentially fruitless things. Instead, go get that monkey.

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