Reverse-Engineering an Elephant

If transformative leadership were a science, it would be paleontology: making sense of fragments, arguing over whether it’s a mammoth or a mouse, and sketching the beast anyway. It reminds me of that old elephant parable - one person feels a trunk and swears it’s a snake, another grabs a leg and insists it’s a tree.

Transformative leadership is like reverse-engineering an elephant from a bag of unlabeled parts. You don’t get the trunk, tusks, and ears with handy instructions - you get bones, fragments, half-stories from your team, and contradictory perspectives. The real skill isn’t assembling what you’ve already seen, but imagining a creature you’ve never encountered. Like a paleontologist who looks at one bone and says, “Aha! A mammoth once roamed here,” transformational leaders must read the part and project the whole.

The twist is that you’ve probably never seen this elephant before. That’s why your people will argue: “It’s a rope,” “It’s a spear,” “It’s definitely a tree trunk.” Each fragment feels familiar, so everyone mistakes it for something they already know. Your job is to see what no one else sees just yet and say, “Actually, it’s an elephant,” and sketch a picture so vivid that everyone else can see it—and feel confident enough to climb on and ride.

This is the essence of leadership that innovates and transforms the workplace and the business. It’s not just herding elephants, but inventing them from parts, without all the facts, and in an ever-changing environment. Transformative leadership is the ability to unite disparate perspectives into a shared vision that inspires people to create something greater than themselves.

It requires imagination, conviction, and enough humour to make people want to keep digging even when the bones don’t quite match. It’s the ability to translate chaos into coherence, to take the scraps of a thousand perspectives and weave them into something living, moving, and meaningful.

Anyone can follow a manual. Few can conjure a creature from fragments. The leaders who can do the latter are the ones who create entirely new possibilities—and persuade others to believe in them.