Are you part of a cargo cult, searching for the formula for success?

First drafted in 2008, completed around 2010 — as the examples give away. Updated in September 2026: the rituals only got bigger.

Have you ever heard of cargo cults? It is a very interesting manifestation of human behavior and one of the most incredible anthropological events of our time.

The cargo cult phenomenon

It has happened on many occasions, but the most famous manifestation took place right after WWII in the Pacific islands: Japanese and American soldiers built military bases on the islands and did not care too much about contacting the indigenous population (there was a war going on after all and they were soldiers not anthropologists).

Both armies sent supplies to their bases either by cargo planes or cargo ships. The indigenous people got familiar with the merchandise either via irregular contact with the soldiers or simply when supplies were accidentally dropped in the wrong place. The natives had no knowledge of industrial processes and could not fathom how those beautiful clothes and shiny objects were produced. It did not take long for them to classify these items as heavenly gifts -- some of them were literally pouring down from heavens.

When the war ended, all the soldiers went home and left the bases deserted. The heavenly gifts obviously ceased as well -- a very unfair predicament to the indigenous people of the region.

How could they resume getting those great celestial gifts? Simple! The local leaders -- understanding that the gifts fell from heavens, because the white man executed complex rituals to invoke divine powers -- came up with a great plan. If they could execute the same rituals themselves, it would only be a matter of time for the gods to see their needs and the supplies would be re-established.

It did not take long for the population of several islands to move to the abandoned bases and start reproducing -- as well as they could -- the daily routine of the soldiers. They built airplanes out of bamboo sticks and walkie-talkies out of coconuts and straws. They would guard the stronghold walls holding rifles made out of sticks and wearing helmets made of leaves. They were acting exactly in line with what made the gods give gifts away. That had to be the formula for success.

Ritual does not equal consequence

This might sound like a silly recollection of an historical event, but it teaches us a great lesson: we should never mistake the ritual for the consequence. You will never make a box of Coca-Cola fall down from the skies by holding a coconut contraption as a walkie-talkie.

If you think only the indigenous people of the Pacific Islands, long ago, could be susceptible to a cargo cult, think again. We are bombarded by the cargo cult phenomenon every single day -- both in business and technology.

Physicist Richard Feynman gave this idea its modern name in his 1974 Caltech commencement address, Cargo Cult Science: activities that follow all the apparent precepts of a discipline but miss the essential ingredient -- the cargo never lands. It is worth reading once a year.

Cargo Cult is happening all around us

Take Twitter, for example. When Twitter boomed, it was a matter of mere weeks for hundreds of similar services to appear: publish 12-second-videos, 1-paragraph-texts, 5-second-voice-messages -- take your pick.

The rationale was that Twitter's success had to be due to its 140-character limitation. Copy the ritual and the gods will be pleased, right? Wrong. Twitter's limitation was due to an actual technical limitation around the SMS platform -- nothing divine.

Back then, the same fever was everywhere: "gamification" sites like Foursquare handing out badges, achievements and little golden stars without really thinking about the entertainment value, and hundreds of games copying Angry Birds' mechanics, hoping to be "the next Angry Birds". Foursquare shut its app down in 2024 -- the badges did not save it.

Of course, there are cheap copies of everything, but the real danger is in truly believing that a previously observed consequence will be achieved by replicating a ritual or the 'cause'.

Copying others blindly is dangerous business

The danger here is to actually believe that the recipe for becoming as good as Steve Jobs, is wearing black turtle-neck sweaters. Or to believe that in order to create Google-like products, you 'only' have to give free lunches and allow 20% for employees to pursue personal projects.

There is a legend going on among entrepreneurs in my home country - Brazil - of a local CEO of a big corporation who visited Google once and was informed that they only hire employees with high academic degrees. When he went back to his office, he quickly and heartlessly fired all his employees who had not achieved at least PhD-level degree. This did not turn out well, as one can imagine.

The biggest cargo cult of them all

Nearly two decades after I first wrote this, the technology industry went and built the biggest cargo cult of them all: Artificial Intelligence.

The ritual is called AI washing. In August 2025, MIT researchers reported that 95% of enterprise generative-AI pilots produced zero measurable return on roughly $30-40 billion of investment. Companies launched chatbots and announced "AI strategies" because that is what successful companies were seen doing -- the corporate version of building an airplane out of bamboo.

Gartner coined the term "agent washing" for vendors rebranding chatbots and old automation scripts as "AI agents". Of the thousands of vendors selling agentic AI, Gartner estimates only about 130 are the real thing -- and predicts more than 40% of these projects will be canceled by the end of 2027.

Sometimes the coconut walkie-talkie is literal. In April 2025, the SEC charged the founder of a shopping app called Nate with fraud: he raised more than $40 million claiming AI completed purchases automatically, while humans in the Philippines and Romania processed the orders by hand. The runway, the headset, the wooden rifle -- all there.

And the consequence-copying continues. Klarna boasted that its AI assistant did the work of 700 customer-service agents -- then reversed course when quality dropped, moving humans back into support roles. Cutting costs with AI was the ritual. Serving customers well was the root cause that got lost.

Quit copying, start focusing

Building airplanes of bamboo won't make supplies come from the heavens. You have probably seen all the Scrum/Agile implementations out there that simply do not work. Every Agilist knows that calling a process Agile won't make it so. Having regular, protocol-only stand-up meetings won't make communication flow. They'll just get in the way. Believing that these rituals will make your product successful is a mistake. It is pure cargo cult. Today the same ritual wears a new uniform: mandatory prompt-engineering trainings, AI-usage OKRs, an "AI-first" slide in every board deck.

What is important is to look for the right root causes for success in everything. Stop copying rituals for their own sake and focus instead on the core issues. If rituals emerge this way, they make sure that the cause and the consequence are properly connected to each other.