What Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Teaches Us About Trust and Cooperation

 I’ve been watching Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, the series about the mysterious organization Monarch and the giant creatures—Titans, or kaiju—that occasionally emerge to wreak havoc on humanity.

I enjoy the series. Not only is Kurt Russell and his son playing the same character over different parts of his life, the other actors and actresses are really good too. Plus - what is NOT to like about a Kaiju movie. 

But, while I’ve been watching, I keep having the same thought. It's about Humanistic Management. 

Why don’t they just work together?

Seriously. Much of the plot revolves around people who are ultimately trying to accomplish the same thing: understand the Titans, contain the threat, and keep human beings from getting killed.

Yet again and again, the people involved work at cross purposes. They withhold information. They make decisions without knowing what other groups know. They become convinced that their approach is the correct one and everyone else is making things worse.

And, of course, sometimes their certainty is spectacularly misplaced. Their solution doesn't solve the problem. It makes it worse.

Which got me thinking about something much bigger than giant monsters. 

Cooperation

Cooperation is one of humanity's most important problem-solving tools. And cooperation depends on trust.  The problem is, when people disagree, they often loose trust. 

But, disagreement isn't necessarily a problem. Disagreement can be incredibly useful.

If everyone looking at a complicated problem reaches exactly the same conclusion, that doesn't necessarily mean they've found the right answer. It might mean they're all making the same assumptions.

The reason we need diversity of opinion and information is because: 

• Different people see different things.
• Different organizations have different experiences.
• Different experts have access to different information.

If we embrace that diversity, we can make collective problem-solving dramatically better. But only if the information is shared.

Information Hoarding is the Bane of Problem Solving

This is where Monarch keeps going wrong. The different groups are rarely working with the same information. One group knows something another group doesn't. Another group has evidence that would change the first group's understanding of the situation.

But the information remains siloed. So everyone is making decisions based on an incomplete picture. And here's the really interesting part: They don't necessarily realize that their picture is incomplete.

We don't know what we don't know

This is one of the most dangerous features of complicated problems. When you don't know something, you don't necessarily know that you don't know it.

You have some information available to you. You analyze it. You come to a conclusion. And from your perspective, the conclusion may look perfectly reasonable.

Meanwhile, someone else has another piece of information that would completely change your analysis. 

But you don't know that they have it. So you don't ask. Or they don't tell you. Or you don't trust them enough to believe what they tell you.

And now you have multiple groups of intelligent, competent people making completely different decisions about the same problem.

Not because they're stupid. Not necessarily because they're malicious. But because they're working with different versions of reality.  

This is like the blind men looking at an elephant. There information is correct, just incomplete. 

Certitude makes the problem worse

There's another problem that shows up repeatedly in Monarch: certainty.

People become convinced that their solution is the right solution. And once we become convinced that we are right, something interesting happens.

• We become less curious.
• We stop asking, "What am I missing?"
• Instead, we start asking, "Why won't everyone else listen to me?"

That shift is dangerous. If I believe I'm right and you disagree with me, I can interpret your disagreement as evidence that you don't understand the problem.

If I believe you don't understand the problem, I have less reason to listen to you. And if I don't listen to you, I won't discover the information you have that I don't.

Which means I become more certain while remaining woefully uninformed. That's a terrible way to solve complicated problems. It creates a feedback loop:

Certitude → less listening → less information → incomplete understanding → bad decisions → more conflict → greater certainty that everyone else is the problem.

And suddenly everyone is working harder and accomplishing less.

The missing ingredient is trust

So why don't people simply share information?

Sometimes the answer is obvious.

• They have competing interests.
• They want money.
• They want power.
• They want credit.
• They want to protect their organization.
• They are afraid that someone else will use their information against them.
• Sometimes they don't trust the other people involved.

And this is where the fictional kaiju problem becomes a very real human problem.

A shared goal isn't always enough to produce cooperation.

Two people can sincerely want the same outcome and still fail to cooperate if they don't trust one another. I can want to solve the problem while simultaneously worrying that you'll take advantage of me.

I can believe that we should both succeed while still believing that giving you access to my information will hurt me. I can even believe that you're a good person and still not trust your organization.

So information gets withheld. Decisions get made in isolation. And everyone loses the benefit of what everyone else knows.

Trust is the infrastructure of cooperation

We sometimes think of trust as the nice thing that happens after people have successfully worked together. But I think that's backwards.

Trust is one of the things that makes successful cooperation possible in the first place.

Cooperation requires vulnerability. I have to tell you what I know. I have to admit what I don't know. I have to allow you to challenge my assumptions. I have to give you information that you might be able to use against me.

And you have to do the same.

That requires a reasonable expectation that we are going to use what we know to solve the problem rather than to exploit each other.

Without that expectation, people protect information. And once information becomes something to hoard, cooperation starts to break down.

Information is a collective resource

Here's the part that really struck me while watching the show: Sometimes the most valuable thing you can contribute to solving a problem isn't your solution. It's the information that allows everyone else to see the problem more accurately.

Imagine five groups each have 20 percent of the information needed to solve a problem. If they cooperate, they might be able to assemble a reasonably complete picture. 

But if they don't share information, you don't have five teams working on a problem. You have five teams working on five different versions of the problem.

Worse, each team probably believes it has enough information to proceed. That's where unintended consequences come from.

It's also why organizations need to be extremely careful about information silos.

A silo can look efficient. But complex problems don't respect organizational boundaries. The monster doesn't care which department is responsible for it. Neither does a pandemic. Or climate change. Or a cybersecurity attack. Or a workplace conflict. Or a dysfunctional organization.

The problem exists in the real world, whether or not our organizational structures are designed to deal with it.  This is why the movie Shin Godzilla requires them to build an interdepartmental team to deal with the problem. Getting information into and out of the silos was a nightmare.  Eliminating the silos by creating an interdisciplinary team allowed the fictional Shin Godzilla governmental team to - fix the problem. 

And yes - Shin Godzilla is a Japanese Godzilla movie and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is one of the USA versions. And that's probably why there is interdisciplinary cooperation in the Japanese film while the American show is ... mired in cooperation and trust problems. 

How do we in the west move forward?  Given our focus on individual cowboy self reliance? Maybe looking at the Japanese model will help. 

Cooperation doesn't mean everyone agrees

I'm not arguing that everyone needs to agree on a solution. Quite the opposite.

We need disagreement. We need people who will say:

• "Wait. What if we're wrong?"
• "We're missing something."
• "Here's what my team is seeing."
• "That doesn't fit with the evidence we have."
• "I think your solution could make this worse."

That's useful. The goal isn't consensus at all costs. The goal is shared understanding.

Once everyone has access to the ALL the relevant information, then we can disagree intelligently. We can compare competing hypotheses. We can test solutions. We can change our minds.

And perhaps most importantly, we can discover that none of us had the complete answer. 

That's not failure. That's what collective intelligence looks like.

The humanist case for cooperation

This is also where I think cooperation connects deeply with humanism. Humanism asks us to take human beings seriously—to recognize both our extraordinary capabilities and our limitations. 

One of our most important limitations is that none of us can know everything.

We are individual human beings with finite attention, finite knowledge, finite experience, and finite ability to process information. That isn't a defect. It's simply part of being human.

And because we are limited individually, we have developed an extraordinary workaround: We cooperate.

We specialize. We teach one another. We share information. We compare observations. We argue. We test ideas. We correct mistakes. We build knowledge collectively.

Civilization itself is, in many ways, a giant cooperation project. But cooperation only works when people can exchange information. And information exchange requires trust.

Don't let profit destroy cooperation

This is where things get particularly complicated.

Sometimes there are genuine reasons to protect information. Businesses have intellectual property. People have privacy. Organizations have legitimate security concerns. Not every piece of information should be shared with everyone.

But there's a huge difference between protecting information for a legitimate reason and siloing information because sharing it might reduce our advantage.

If we are facing a problem that affects everyone, deliberately withholding information that could help solve that problem can create enormous costs to the real live people we share this planet with.

Sometimes protecting our short-term advantage makes the long-term problem much worse. 

The question we should ask is:

Does keeping this information to ourselves help solve the problem—or does it simply help us maintain control?

Those aren't the same thing.  A big plot point of this show is that there is a multi-national corporation using the Kaiju attacks to create a business model that they can exploit. They have government contracts, but aren't dealing honestly with the government. They are pursuing their own economic objectives. 

More importantly, they also don't share the same objectives as the other groups in the show. While they do want to stop the Kaiju from hurting people. They are also trying to figure out if they can harness the Kaiju as a military weapon and control them. 

In other words, their main objective isn't to solve the problem. They see the problem, the Kaiju, as something they should try to control. And that is why they fail.

Control is an illusion.  We can barely control ourselves. A humanist doesn't try to control. We try to solve problems in a way that benefits as many people as possible. Creating another weapon - is not on our agenda. 

What if we assumed we were missing something?

Perhaps one of the most useful habits we could develop when facing complicated problems is intellectual humility.

Not: "I'm probably wrong."

But: "I might be missing something."

That small change matters. It makes curiosity possible. It makes questions possible. It makes listening possible. And it makes cooperation possible.

Before deciding that someone else is the obstacle, ask: What do they know that I don't know?

Before dismissing another group's solution, ask: What information are they working from?

Before becoming certain that your solution is the answer, ask: What would I need to know to discover that I'm wrong?

Those questions don't guarantee that we'll solve the problem. But they dramatically increase the odds that we're actually solving the same problem.

We don't need fewer smart people. We need smarter cooperation.

The lesson I took from Monarch: Legacy of Monsters isn't that people need to stop disagreeing.

It's that we need to get better at cooperating while we disagree.

We need to share information. We need to acknowledge uncertainty. We need to make it safe for people to tell us what we don't want to hear. We need to build enough trust that people aren't constantly protecting information from one another.

And we need to recognize that being confident in our own solution doesn't mean everyone else is incompetent. They may simply be seeing something we can't see.

The biggest problem isn't always that nobody has the answer. Sometimes everybody has a piece of the answer—and nobody is sharing. So the next time you're facing a complicated problem, don't just ask:

"What's the solution?"

Ask: "Who knows something I don't know?" Then listen to them.

Because when the problem is bigger than any one person, organization, or perspective, the path forward isn't finding the person who is right.

It's creating the conditions in which all of us can be right about something—and wrong about something—and still work together to figure out what to do to solve our collective problem. 

Lessons Learned:

The next time you think to yourself, if only this other person/group/organization/whatever, would accept I'm right we could solve this problem. Stop yourself from going down that rabbit hole.

Instead, remind yourself that they are operating from information you don't have. Use your critical thinking and compassion to be humble about what you almost certainly don't know. And start asking honest questions to learn - what you don't know.

And if someone tells you, there is more to this problem. Or that the problem has nuance to it that your solution isn't taking into account, please - LISTEN! 

Freedom Begins in the Mind

Recently, I've been spending time watching the new baby black crested mangabey at the zoo where I volunteer. His name is Sullivan. He's about two months old now—still tiny, still dependent on his mother's milk, still very much a baby. 

But something fascinating is happening. He's begun picking up pieces of lettuce and bringing them to his mouth. He's not actually eating the lettuce yet. He's copying his mother.

Watching him has been a delightful reminder that humans are apes too, and we learn much the same way. Before we understand the world, before we can reason about it, we imitate. We watch others. We mimic their behaviors. We absorb the habits, beliefs, fears, and preferences of the people around us.

This ability to learn through observation is one of our species' greatest strengths. It allowed human knowledge and culture to accumulate across generations. We don't each have to rediscover fire, invent language, or figure out social rules from scratch.

But this remarkable ability comes with a cost. The same brain that allows us to learn from others also makes us susceptible to being influenced by them. And that is why freedom begins in the mind.

When we think about freedom, we often think about external things—freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom from oppression. These freedoms matter enormously. But there is another kind of freedom that is just as important and often overlooked:

The freedom to think for yourself.

Your Brain Is Designed to Be Influenced

Every day, our thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors are being shaped by forces around us. Advertisers compete for our attention. Social media algorithms reward outrage and conformity. Peer groups exert pressure to fit in. Political movements, cultural narratives, and even workplace dynamics all attempt to influence what we believe and how we behave.

Most of this influence is not malicious. It is simply part of being human.

We evolved to be social because, for our ancestors, belonging to the group often meant survival. Individuals who paid attention to what others were doing and copied successful behaviors had an advantage.

The baby mangabey doesn't need anyone to explain to him that lettuce is food. He watches his mother and begins practicing the behavior long before he fully understands it.

Humans do the same thing.

Children imitate language, emotional reactions, social norms, and cultural beliefs long before they are capable of critically examining them. As adults, we continue to imitate, often without realizing it. We adopt opinions from our social groups, absorb assumptions from our cultures, and unconsciously respond to rewards and punishments in our environments.

Over time, these influences can become so deeply ingrained that we mistake conditioned responses for freely chosen decisions.

Freedom Requires Self-Awareness

The question is not whether we are influenced. We all are.

The question is whether we understand those influences well enough to choose how we respond to them.

Psychological freedom begins with self-awareness.

The moment we start asking questions, we reclaim power:

• Why do I believe this?
• Who taught me to think this way?
• Is this belief based on evidence or social pressure?
• Am I acting from my values or reacting from fear?
• Does this choice reflect who I want to be?

These questions interrupt automatic responses and create space for conscious choice.

Freedom lives in that space.

This is why critical thinking is so important. It is not merely an intellectual skill. It is a form of self-defense.

A person who understands behavioral psychology, cognitive biases, and social influence becomes significantly harder to manipulate. They become less dependent on social approval and more capable of acting according to their own values.

The Five Managerial Superpowers and Mental Freedom

Many people think leadership is about influencing others. But ethical leadership begins with learning to lead ourselves.

In Mastering the Five Managerial Superpowers, I explore five essential capacities that help individuals reclaim control over their thinking and behavior:

• Self-awareness
• Compassion
• Self-control
• Understanding behavioral science
• Managing conflict constructively

These are not merely management skills.

They are freedom skills.

Self-awareness helps us recognize when emotions and social pressures are driving our decisions.

Compassion allows us to understand others without becoming captive to their approval or disapproval.

Behavioral science teaches us how habits, rewards, and environments shape behavior—both our own and that of others.

Conflict management helps us resist manipulation through fear, intimidation, and social pressure.

Together, these skills create something powerful:

Psychological independence.

The ability to think clearly, act ethically, and choose deliberately instead of simply reacting.

Reclaiming Your Mind

Watching that little mangabey has reminded me of something profound.

Copying others is not a flaw in human nature. It is one of our greatest evolutionary strengths.

But maturity requires something more than imitation. At some point, we must move beyond merely copying the behaviors and beliefs around us and begin consciously deciding which ideas deserve our loyalty.

Freedom does not mean becoming immune to influence. That would be impossible.

Freedom means becoming aware of the forces shaping us and intentionally choosing which influences align with our values.

It means learning to pause before reacting.

It means questioning narratives, examining assumptions, and choosing principles over pressure.

Because while we cannot control everything happening around us, we can learn to better control how we respond.

That is where freedom begins.

Not in governments.
Not in institutions.
Not in other people.

But in the mind.

And perhaps one of the greatest forms of freedom available to human beings is this: the ability to understand how we are shaped, and then consciously choose who we wish to become.

If you would like practical tools for developing that kind of psychological independence, Mastering the Five Managerial Superpowers explores the behavioral science, self-awareness, and leadership skills that can help you become a more intentional, ethical, and resilient human being.

Because before we can lead others well, we must first learn how to lead ourselves.

When You Say No With Kindness, You Create Space for Better Things

One of the more surprising things people learn about me when they interview me is how often I say no.

That sounds strange coming from an entrepreneur.

Aren’t entrepreneurs supposed to say yes? Yes to opportunities. Yes to growth. Yes to networking. Yes to hustle. Yes to every customer, every invitation, every possibility.

But working for myself has taught me something different.

Balance doesn’t happen by accident.

When you work for yourself, every yes costs something. Usually time. Often energy. Sometimes peace.

So I say no to a lot of things.

Not because I’m lazy. Not because I’m ungrateful. Not because I don’t care.

I say no because every no creates space to fill with something better.

That “better” isn’t always productive. Sometimes it’s just life.

A movie with my husband.

An evening knitting.

A nice dinner.

A quiet afternoon.

Space to think.

Space to create.

Space to enjoy the business I worked so hard to build.

The point of working for myself wasn’t to become unavailable to myself.

That philosophy shows up in my work in practical ways.

There are things that need to happen to keep the business running that I simply don’t enjoy doing. So I hire people.

Delegation isn’t failure. It’s design.

Housekeeping? I hate dusting. So I pay someone else to do it.

That purchase isn’t about avoiding responsibility—it’s buying back time.

Time I can spend writing.

Time I can spend learning.

Time I can spend with people I love.

The same principle applies to opportunities.

People occasionally ask me to travel for speaking engagements.

Years ago, I might have automatically said yes.

Now?

If you want me to travel, you either need to compensate me enough that the tradeoff makes sense—or be located somewhere I’d genuinely enjoy visiting.  Ideally? Both. 

Travel isn’t just two hours of speaking. It’s preparation, airports, hotels, transit, recovery time, and days away from my family.

That’s a high price.

But technology gives us options. Want me to do a live Q&A? Great. Let’s do Zoom. One hour of meaningful interaction instead of several days lost to logistics.

That’s not saying no to people. That’s saying yes to a different way of working.

I use the same approach with my daily to-do list.

If I don’t want to do something—or don’t realistically have time to do it—I move it to another day.

People sometimes call that procrastination. I call it scheduling.

Because something interesting happens when you put things off, intentionally.

A surprising number of things never actually needed doing.

Other things turn out to matter and rise naturally to the top.

Deferring isn’t always avoidance. Sometimes it’s clarification.

You discover what’s essential by giving yourself permission not to do everything immediately.

Saying no with kindness isn’t about becoming closed off.

It’s about becoming intentional.

It’s recognizing that your calendar is a reflection of your values.

And if you fill every available space with obligations, there’s no room left for joy.

No room for relationships.

No room for curiosity.

No room for the things that make all the work worth doing.

Your life is finite.

Your time is finite.

Your energy is finite.

Spend them on purpose.

Say no kindly. Then fill that space with something better.

Evolution Doesn’t Plan—And Neither Should Learning

I was volunteering at the zoo recently and ended up having one of my favorite kinds of conversations—the kind where someone asks a question that seems simple but opens the door to something bigger.

We were talking about convergent evolution and mangabeys.

Mangabeys are a group of monkeys that scientists originally thought all belonged together because they look remarkably similar. Same general body shape. Similar lifestyles. Similar features.

Makes sense, right? Except… later genetic research showed something surprising. Not all mangabeys are actually each other’s closest relatives. 

Some mangabeys are more closely related to mandrills. Those in blue. 

Others are more closely related to baboons Those in orange and green. What is even crazier is that the one in green is more closely related to baboons than to the ones in orange.  Our species at the Chattanooga Zoo is the Black Crested Mangabey. 

Scientists originally grouped them together because, based on what they could observe, it seemed obvious. And then they learned more. Turns out different evolutionary branches arrived at similar solutions.

Why?

Because that body shape works really well for the ecological niche they occupy. Different animals evolving stumbled into that shape and form and teeth and enzyme creating saliva more than once.

That’s convergent evolution.

Once you start noticing it, you see it everywhere.

One of my favorite examples is the Tasmanian tiger. Despite the name, it wasn’t a tiger. It wasn’t even a cat. It was a marsupial.

But it evolved a body plan that looked remarkably similar to placental predators because those features worked for the job.

Different starting points. Similar destination.

The Big Question About Evolution

At that point in the conversation, one of the parents asked me a question I hear a lot: “But how do animals know how to change?”

And I love that question. Because the answer is simple and profound. They don’t. What they do is survive. 

Evolution doesn’t have goals. Animals don’t decide to grow longer legs or sharper teeth. Nothing is planning ahead.  They just survive. 

Every generation's DNA contains variation. Mutations happen naturally. Some help. Some hurt. Most don’t matter much.

If a variation helps an individual survive long enough to reproduce, it has a better chance of showing up in the next generation. If it doesn’t, it tends to disappear.

No intention.

No foresight.

Just survival. 

Given enough time and changing conditions, those that survive, may change into different shapes. Sometimes those shapes converge, like mangabeys. 

Sometimes those shapes diverge.  Like camelids in North America. When the ice age happened it disrupted the climate. Some camelids migrated to Asia to survive and evolved into modern camels. Others headed south and evolved into alpacas and llamas. The ones that stayed in North America - didn't survive and went extinct because of the changing climate. This is why even though this family of animals evolved on the North American continent for 10s of millions of years (there were tall giraffe types, and smaller types and giant ones), we have no camelids in North America anymore. Most didn't survive climate change. 

The Joy of Learning

What struck me afterward wasn’t just how interested this family was in the evolutionary biology which is super cool. It was the question I got after explaining how cool mangabeys are and the craziness of their convergent evolution.  

How do animals KNOW how to evolve. What shape will work for them? 

Because that question—that willingness to say “Wait… how does that actually work?”—is something I deeply admire.

That father could have nodded politely and moved on. Instead, he got curious. And curiosity changes everything.

Humanism, to me, starts there. With the recognition that the world is under no obligation to match our assumptions.

Sometimes what looks obvious turns out not to be true. Scientists thought mangabeys were all one close family. They asked more questions and learned otherwise.  And what they learned was even more amazing than their predecessors could have imagined. 

I’ve been interpreting for our black crested mangabeys for a year. I only learned their evolution recently. I volunteer at the zoo all the time and I still discover things I didn’t know.

That’s not failure. That’s the joy of learning.

The world is full of things we think we understand. Until we ask one more question. 

So stay curious.

Ask the question.

Be willing to discover you were wrong.

Be excited when reality turns out to be more interesting than you expected.

Because learning isn’t evidence that you didn’t know enough before. Learning is evidence that you’re paying attention. And that, to me, is one of the best parts of being human.