In Tim’s case he is referring to situations where companies continue to operate based on the status quo despite an elephant staring at them from across the room. Their fear is that dealing with the elephant might reveal a herd, so everyone just pretends they don’t see it. The problem is that eventually the herd (it is always there, the fear is justified) will rear it’s head and stampede - it’s best to know when and have the path cleared out for them, and hope that behind them is the buried treasure.

In Ted’s case everyone sees the elephant and talks about it, complains about the space it takes up, and laments the fact that nobody is willing to take it back to the zoo. These people may even recognize that there’s treasure buried under that elephant, but they want only the reward, not the risk associated with digging it up. So they might hide in a tree and shoot off a flare in the hopes of scaring the elephant away, but really they have no way of directing its flight nor of ensuring it doesn’t just come right back.

It’s my view that these situations are actually very strongly related. One of the greatest skills I have observed in successful people is the ability to identify not just a problem, but also the right question - something like “Why is there an elephant in the room to begin with?” Simply moving the elephant aside and cleaning up the mess is rarely sufficient. A legitimate ’solution’ is to find out what brought it there, and how to prevent it from happening again. In fact by asking the right question you stand to discover tremendous opportunity, not just from fixing a problem but from improving an entire operation - that’s the real buried treasure, as Tim points out.

People that ask the right question often seem to have an uncanny ability to think through the whole process for arriving at a solution as well. Any organisation that truly has the desire to be successful will find a way to breed that sort of questioning and reward creative and thorough solutions, as Ted says. In fact the greatest success is to be found by asking questions when there is no elephant in sight - if your organisation can develop the ability to continually question and thoroughly respond, with full freedom afforded to the range of ‘allowable’ solutions, your long-term success is all but guaranteed. Questioning is the foundation for innovation, which is the trigger for solutions. So don’t be led by ’solutions’ - develop better ones by questioning and innovating.

Many years ago, private corporations realized that the solutions are not exercised in the boardroom, and that the most successful companies have the fewest group meetings. Looking for problems and even openly discussing failures is a laudable trait in successful orgainizations. Its the failure to pick a target, implement a proposed solution and re-assess the same problem afterwards that creates stagnation and worker dissatisfaction.