Teaching the Elephant to Dance

There's an old image writers use so often for organizational change that it's nearly a cliché, and I use it anyway because I haven't found a better one: the culture you already have is an elephant. Enormous. Slow to turn. You cannot push an elephant anywhere it doesn't want to go. The only thing you can do, if you want it to move, is teach it to dance — which means working with its actual weight and rhythm, not pretending it's something lighter and faster than it is.

92% of the C-suite is now cultivating what one recent workforce report calls an "AI elite" — a favored class of employees fluent in the new tools. At the same time, 60% say they plan to lay off whoever doesn't adopt AI fast enough. A Gartner analyst put the quiet part out loud recently: almost none of these companies have an honest plan for what AI is actually doing to their people, their pace, and their pipeline of future leaders.

I recognize this move. It's pushing the elephant. It's the oldest mistake in organizational change, just wearing a new outfit: assume the culture is an obstacle to route around instead of a partner to earn trust with, and build a favored inner circle while quietly deciding who gets cut.

The elephant doesn't resist because it's stubborn. It resists because it can tell, usually before the announcement, whether this new thing threatens what it already values, or whether the people leading it actually know where they're going.

Is your organization teaching the elephant to dance, or trying to push it?

From Dancing in the Wind: An Adaptive Leadership Framework in the Age of AI.