The idea of the cargo cult derives from anthropological observations made about the behaviour of societies that encounter more technologically advanced societies, especially the rituals and objects created by Pacific islanders in an attempt to attract modern goods and technology and generally earn favour with people who they thought could prevent terrible events. Often linked to apocalyptic predictions embedded in local folklore, the term is most commonly associated with the behaviour of Melanesian people when they first came into contact with Westerners and their contraptions and materials in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.
One of the most commonly related stories about cargo cult behaviour is that, although the Melanesion people were technologically and culturally advanced in many ways, the arrival of aeroplanes and ships full of food and wealth was so radically different from what they knew, and apparently so powerful, that they looked for ways to attract more of them. This included the ritualistic creation of runways and roads as well as straw replicas of planes and antennae. Some cult members also took to mimicking the sounds made by planes and wearing mock wooden headphones to summon them to their islands. They did not understand the technology, but they understood its shapes and associations.
Cargo cult science
The baggage of colonialism can distort our perceptions of this sort of behaviour. The islanders weren’t ‘savages’ but members of an advanced society coping with technology and cultures they could not fully understand at first sight. We also don’t have to look very far to see examples of the same sort of behaviour in our own society.
The physicist Richard Feynman may have been the first to draw attention to this parallel in a 1974 address in which he warned that what he termed cargo cult science was something to which we are all prone, even (or perhaps especially) academics and scientists. This isn’t just about the standard confusion of correlation and causation, but something even more distorted because it is based on an association between a form or an idea and a desired outcome, often propped up with assumptions and misapplied research.
“The form is perfect”, he said. “It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land.”
The modern office
If you can’t see where I’m going with this, I’m probably not doing my job. Organisations can feel compelled to adopt certain forms in their offices because they are associated with particular, desirable outcomes, often backed up by research that may or may not be applicable in a specific context.
In this case, organisations look at the examples of firms that appear to have what they think is a more advanced take on office design and all the benefits it brings – wellness, youth, productivity, sexiness – and assume that if they copy the features in their workplaces, they’ll enjoy them too. But instead of straw planes and wooden headphones, they introduce ping pong and compulsory fun.
And yet the planes still don’t land when they should.