To Flea, or not to Flea, In a Jar.

A payday story from Rememberable - a place of powerful stories for business and everyday use

A lesser known project within Operation Paperclip, the US’s post war program of deploying Axis scientists into new endeavours for the benefit of the West amidst the rising tensions of the Cold War, was that of faunic-gene-splicing run by German uber-brain Dr Franz A. Kename.

Franz had a specific brief - find examples of extraordinary ability in the animal kingdom, and figure out how to imbue the West’s soldiers with those same powers. It was a heady brief, but funding was minimal and the unavailability of abundant test subjects restrained any real progress - he could not afford a hundred cats, let alone a hundred bears, or a hundred lions, which might make for interesting experiments.

Sat dejectedly in his run-down living quarters one day, Franz noticed a flea infestation at the bottom of his bed. The fleas were jumping extraordinary distances relative to their size, he thought. The equivalent, surely, of whole buildings were they scaled up to the size of a man…

Franz had a eureka moment: Here was an abundant pool of test subjects, in his own bedroom, and an augmentation worthy of experimentation. He gathered up as many of the fleas as he could and took them into the lab.

Once there, however, he was disappointed to find his fleas did not seem to be jumping as high as they were in his room. No amount of encouragement made them jump more than a few inches high, when Franz had been expecting heights of a metre or more.

Undeterred, he returned to his quarters where sure enough there were extraordinary levels of flea athleticism on display. He gathered up some more subjects and returned to the lab - only to see the same disappointing results when there.

This continued for a number of weeks, until Franz realised what was happening. Though it was a short time to Franz, the time the fleas spent in the box being transported from bedroom to laboratory was enough to acclimatise them to the space within that box. They went from jumping great heights, to only being able to jump the height of the box they were in. Without realising it, they had become contained, and defined, by their environment.

Once they were ‘put in a box,’ they lost their ability to reach their full potential.

The Point of it All

I love the story of Doctor F. A. Kename. It can be told as a reminder to individuals to keep testing their own limits; to believe they can always do more, go bigger, dream more abundantly. It can be told to managers as an imperative to keep driving their team forward, to not be constrained by whatever limitations they feel are imposed. For senior leaders - it is the reminder to never ‘be constraining.’ Be aware of the unhelpful boundaries that exist in your organisation/team, and seek ways to break out of them.

It is a reminder, that in so very many ways, we are limited only by our ambition and our imagination.

Our ambition, and our imagination.