It doesn’t take long in any company to discover those institutionalized processes that few ever question. Such a scenario brings to mind a popular fable about a sociological experiment:
Week 1: Place five monkeys in a room. Place a banana on a string from the ceiling. Every time a monkey tries to reach for a banana, spray all the monkeys with ice-cold water. It doesn’t matter who reaches for the banana, all the monkeys get sprayed. After a week of research, no monkey in the room will attempt to reach for a banana.
Week 2: Take out one of the monkeys and introduce a new one to the room. The first thing that the newcomer will try to do is to reach for the banana hanging from the ceiling. However, he will deal with great force and intimidation from the other monkeys, since they, of course, know that it will be followed by an ice-cold shower. After a while, the newcomer stops attempting to reach for the banana, since anytime he does it, he’s beaten up by the four old-timers.
Week 3: Remove another of the original monkeys from the room, and introduce a new one. Observe the same scenario. Also observe the newcomer from week 2 admonishing the new monkey not to reach for the banana.
Week 4: Repeat. Now you’ve got 2 monkeys from week 1 and 3 new monkeys.
Week 5: Repeat.
Week 6: This is where it gets interesting. A brand new monkey is introduced, replacing the last remaining original monkey. However, observe how aggressively the newcomer will be “advised” once he tries to reach for the banana. Notice that none of the monkeys currently in the room have experienced or are even aware of the ice-cold shower.
So why don’t they reach for the banana? Because that’s the way we’ve always done it.
Sound familiar?
Achieving Speech Privacy has long been the same way. Many acoustic professionals and manufacturers continue using the same paradigm they’ve been using for the last half-century, putting the speakers above the suspended ceiling, and then compensating for the same problems they’ve always faced.
The VoiceArrest System takes a different approach to sound masking, providing the most uniform – and therefore the most effective – speech privacy available.
