The term cargo was first used to describe a range of practices carried out by a group of people that occurs in the wake of contact with more technologically advanced societies.

For example:

“The cargo cults of Melanesia, in attempts to get cargo to fall by parachute or land in planes or ships again, imitated the same practices they had seen the soldiers, sailors, and airmen use. Cult behaviors usually involved mimicking the day-to-day activities and dress styles of US soldiers, such as performing parade ground drills with wooden or salvaged rifles. The islanders carved headphones from wood and wore them while sitting in fabricated control towers. They waved the landing signals while standing on the runways. They lit signal fires and torches to light up runways and lighthouses... many built life-size replicas of airplanes out of straw and cut new military-style landing strips out of the jungle, hoping to attract more airplanes.”

The cargo cults were clearly guilty of trying to copy the behavioural by-products of the advanced societies that visited them instead of what made those societies advanced in the first place. I might want to strike a football as elegantly as David Beckham in his prime, but all of the sleeve tattoos, fauxhawk hair stylings and pop-star pursuing in the world isn’t going to help my cause.

The modern day equivalent of a cargo cult in the corporate arena would have to be that of the innovation cargo cult, where mimicking the day-to-day activities, dress styles and characteristics of the tech startup ecosystem is practiced in place of the genuine application of effort to address an organisation’s inhibiting processes, values and systems. The aforementioned passage could just as well read: