Thursday, September 04, 2008

Confronting the elephant in the room....


When I was sitting at the desk of the Director of the Concepting Group, working on his newly deployed Macbook, I glanced around his cube while waiting for a task to complete.  He is an extraordinarily talented artist (and a really COOL guy) and has several of his sketches posted on his cube wall.  As I looked them over, one of them, sketched with a blue sketch pencil grabbed my attention.  It was a drawing of an elephant in profile...its huge majestic ears slightly fanned, its trunk dangled loosely in front of it.  The detail was so amazing...the skin, the tusks, the eyes, with their eyelashes...the tuft of hair on its belly....as I scanned all the elephant\'s details appreciating Victor\'s talent, I realized that I had missed a very crucial detail...the elephant was standing in a boardroom, with a large oval conference table surrounded by a crowd of chairs...they were talking among themselves, oblivious to the humongous animal in the room with them, sucking up their air, and potentially leaving unsavory reminders of itself, should it leave the room.....in a flash of realization, it dawned on me that this sketch meant more to me than I would have at first imagined...and that it was probably much more than a serendipitous coincidence that I had observed it on this particular day.


In the past few weeks, it seems that this particular endeavor (acknowledging the elephant in the room) has become much more prevalent in some very important discussions occuring in both the personal and work arenas. It seems that walking around the behemoth has gotten too difficult and time consuming to do anymore and as a result previously ignored or unnoted behaviours are being taken note of, mulled over and using all kinds of strategies whose effectiveness I sorely question, being *discussed*  As my personal knowledge of these conversations is high level at best, and for the most part only from one participant\'s point of view (and the participant feeling very much like their view was of the posterior end of the pachyderm) I am hard pressed to declare any potential success or failure in the attempts to finally become acquainted with the this prominent, and I doubt invited, guest.  All I know for sure is, now that it is acknowledged to exist, the other inhabitants of the various rooms will be hard pressed to ignore it any longer and will be forced to address it and be come informed about it so they can deal with it. 


In any case...home from work...this topic has been on my mind for numerous reasons...had to take a stab at putting it in words....hope you are well and enjoying the early autumn days...till later, much love to you


 


v