Thursday, January 21, 2010

Elephants on my mind

This morning I woke up and realized that a disproportionately large part of my brain is occupied by elephants. I say "disproportionately" because my knowledge of elephants is quite limited (average or less), I have no special interest in them, and they have played no role worth mentioning in my life. As far as I know, I was not attacked by a zoo elephant as a child, and I have never even seen them in the wild.

Why is it, then, that when looking for analogies, my first choice often includes elephants? Some examples. One of the management books I read recently speaks of the "dead boss syndrome" which is when staff continues to behave as if a long-gone boss were still in charge. When explaining this concept to a colleague, however, I immediately transposed this into the "chained elephant analogy" (grown elephants are perfectly capable of breaking the chains around their ankles, but they don't even try, because of all the years they tried but failed, when they were younger and weaker). Or when discussing the lack of global vision needed to achieve improvement, I recurred to the story of how ten blind men were asked to describe an elephant, and came up with the wildest ideas because all the information they had was what they could feel with their hands. I have also been known to refer to certain colleagues as elephants in a porcelain shop. And of course, being in the lower ranks of the organisation and lamenting my fate, I often mention how the grass (or the mice, depending on my mood) gets trampled when elephants dance.

What is perhaps even more surprising is the fact that I remember doing all of the above. I don't believe in reincarnation, but if I did, I might conclude I was an elephant in a previous life. And if this were to be the case, I would definitely file a complaint with the appropriate authorities, because my skin is far too thin.