(I would like to thank John Sumser for putting this back on my radar… I have wanted to write this piece for a while.)
The parable of the six blind men and the elephant has been recounted in many forums. While the original parable first originated in India and was passed as oral tradition through Hindu mystics, the English version of the parable was popularized by a early 19th century poet named John Godfrey Saxe. The full text of his poem is included at the end of this post.
The parable (and its representative poem) should be required reading for anybody who makes their living in the business world, regardless of whether you are an artist, engineer or accountant. In my 23+ years in business I have yet to see a critical business meeting that didn’t fail (to some degree) at this most fundamental level of understanding: we are each telling different stories about the same thing, each of us passionately committed to our version of the truth even though we don't have that much on which to base our opinion.
The last verse of the poem says it beautifully:
So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen.
How many of us have seen this played out in meetings? More importantly, how much competitive advantage would a company create if it had someone at the meeting who could take the various impressions of the blind men and coordinate them into a description of the truth that everyone could “see”?
Who is that person? The coordinator of information must be someone who is willing to take the risk of reflecting back to everyone what they are saying. Sometimes that will be a person with a fancy title, but more often than not it will be someone who just raises their hand and says "Here is what I am hearing, and here is how I think it all fits".
But regardless of who the leader is, it is painfully clear that the “wise men” must be all of us. Each of us must be prepared to bring our version of the elephant to the table, as well as listen to everyone else's version of "the truth". And even more importantly, each of must be willing to ask that we have access to all the original stories of every other person at the table. We must demand transparency, and then show the wisdom and emotional intelligence to demonstrate that we are worthy of the trust and honor that transparency demands. For when a person who is perceived to have power starts the conversation, things often go painfully wrong. This lesson is best expressed by another parable based on elephants and wise people:
Six blind elephants were discussing what wise men were like (never having seen one). Failing to agree, they decided to find one and determine what it was like by direct experience. The first blind elephant felt the wise man, and declared, “Wise men are flat.” After feeling the wise man, the other blind elephants agreed.
This parable shows the danger of having the powerful describe reality: they can literally flatten the data before it ever gets investigated by anyone else. I can think of many situations where this has happened in public policy (the Mexican American war, the Spanish American War, Vietnam… to name just a few). But it is every bit as common in business. Enron happened because Jeffrey Skilling flattened the original data such that everyone else in the company had to react to his version of the truth. Since the first person or group dealing with the data has the (either unintentional or intentional) ability to change the data by their reading of it, every participant thereafter must react to the changed data rather than original information. This is how groups so often go wrong: they are all reacting to the same story, and that story is just plain wrong.
So we not only need someone at the table to coordinate the stories of all the wise people, none of whom has ever seen the elephant but all of which have a strong opinion given their personal experience about just what the elephant is. We also need someone who is making sure that there is no one person who is defining the initial reality, who is getting to the data first and therefore changing it so that all the opinions that come thereafter are simply an affirmation of the first person’s ability to change the information by their force.
Most companies ignore these structural issues altogether. They assume that leadership, by its definition, is the role of describing reality to the followers. The ability to change data so that others have to respond to that world-view is often an assessed capability of what is considered leadership potential. But in a world where everything changes quickly and where the issues being confronted are so enormous that the best any single person can do is to feel some small part of a gargantuan beast, leadership now must be something much different. Leadership must be ensuring that we are all sharing our part of the story, and that no single story becomes dominant before the rest of the stories are in. Then, rather than telling us which story is right (since the leader is often as blind as everyone else who is feeling the situation), the leader must explain how the stories coordinate into something like a reality that all of us can embrace and react to.
It may seem trite or overly simplistic, but just getting your story straight may be the single greatest competitive advantage you can create.
The full poem follows. Enjoy...
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