Elephants at Work: The missing, the herds, and the infamous one in the room
What you avoid often rules.
“A person's success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.” - Tim Ferris
I often think about this quote. How applicable it is to both conversations with ourselves and others. A lot of time and energy is wasted dealing with the consequences of ignoring the obvious (aka the elephant in the room) or avoiding the necessary. This is true in our personal lives and professionally. This newsletter being what it is, I’m going to focus on how this issue manifests at work, through the medium of elephants (because why not…).
The Elephant in the Room
This elephant is defined as a major problem or controversial issue which is obviously present but avoided as a subject for discussion. This is surprisingly common in business, especially in cultures which lean towards indirect feedback, or ones immersed in inconsistency and fear. Companies who ignore the elephant often have a troubled relationship with reality, especially when buoyed by ample VC funding. Individuals who ignore it often struggle to process difficult emotions. These elephants can come in many guises. Sometimes it’s strategic, such as a team planning marketing activities to drive growth, without acknowledging the fact that there is no evidence they’ve built a product people want. Sometimes it’s more people-orientated, such as creating an organisational roadmap, while ignoring the fact nobody has faith in leadership to deliver. This can happen on a personal level in our careers too. One example is planning next steps to get promoted while refusing to accept that we’re no longer interested in that particular career path.
Ignoring the elephant in the room creates work. More time, money and energy can be expended trying to work around the issue being avoided, rather than tackling the issue head on. There is a time limit for how long an elephant can be ignored before the sh*t piles up in the room. These issues always come to a head. A startup that tries to sell something nobody wants eventually runs out of money. A struggling leader can only persist for so long before peers refuse to pick up the slack. A person pursuing a career which doesn’t align with their values eventually experiences burnout.
If you know there is an issue you / your organisation are not addressing here are a few questions to ask yourself:
What is the issue? (Try using the 5 whys technique to get the root cause if it’s not immediately obvious).
What does the future look like in 6 months if this issue is not addressed?
What actions are currently in place, or are you considering implementing to work around this issue?
Why take these actions rather than address the issue directly?
Hopefully, these questions will help highlight the core reason why issues aren’t being addressed. Then you can decide if you’re willing to act on it or continue to accept the consequences.
The Herds
Elephants don’t travel alone. Once you ignore one major problem, you usually end up creating a subset of corresponding problems which have a cascading effect. Consider this scenario. Sales are low. Rather than addressing the elephant in the room that there is a lack of product market fit, an organisation chooses to expand their sales team to try to boost revenue instead. The underlying issue hasn’t been solved but now there is a herd of additional issues to deal with. Prospects targeted with sales demos are missed as an opportunity for deeper user research. A higher burn rate reduces the time available to figure out PMF. A demoralised sales team dampens company morale as they realise they have the impossible task of selling a product that doesn’t really solve a problem. The organisation continues to expend more resources (hiring marketing, SalesOps, SDRs) in a misguided attempt to resolve the issue and now have teams of people working on the wrong problem. What was once one elephant has grown into a herd.
If you have identified an elephant in the room problem, consider the downstream effects of ignoring this. Are you creating a herd?
If there were no difficult conversations to be had or guilt/shame to be dealt with, objectively, what actions would you take to remedy the situation?
Are you willing to live with the consequences of not doing that?
The Missing Elephants
We can become so accustomed to our own world and way of operating that we cannot see the elephants at all. A startup which struggles to gain traction for years eventually accepts this as the default modus operandi rather than a major problem that requires intense focus to solve. Someone who has been passed over for promotion several times ignores the signs that their organisation just doesn’t see them as the right fit. Missing elephants are more often a sign of stagnation than ignorance. You can have a lot of capable, intelligent people completely missing the obvious if they have been distracted by focusing on the wrong things for long enough.
If someone new walked into your organisation tomorrow, what do you think they would highlight as issues?
How much have your key KPIs changed in the last 12 months? (e.g. revenue growth, # of customers, # of daily transactions). If minimal, is this disguising a problem?
How long have you been discussing the same issues for? Could it be a case you’re not tackling the root cause?
Not every issue can be dealt with. Some may magically disappear of their own accord but persistent problems can only be ignored for so long. The elephant needs to be escorted out of the room. Otherwise it will eventually destroy it.