Seeing the Whole Elephant

And how resilience begins when we name the things we don't understand

Before you make a process change—are you thinking about everyone it might touch?

This isn’t just a piece about creative process—or about broken systems. It’s about what happens when we treat creativity as a tool for diagnosing complexity. The kind that hides in silos, in inherited work, in quietly broken processes that become symptoms to a bigger issue. And how resilience starts by naming what we don’t know yet.

We’re human. We don’t know what we don’t know. Sometimes we think we do. Sometimes we get lucky. Most of the time, we don’t.

There’s this parable about the blind men and the elephant. Each one touches a different part: trunk, leg, tusk, side. One says it’s a snake. Another, a tree. Another, a wall. They’re all technically right—and completely wrong.

Strategy looks different when you think you're dealing with a wall vs. an elephant.

This is where so many process decisions go sideways. We optimize for speed. We’re told to avoid analysis paralysis, “just ship it.” But if we don’t take even a moment to ask why or what else might break, we’re just building a workaround for a workaround.

And you can be certain we’ll meet those blind spots again later—only with more pressure, less context, and bigger stakes.

This doesn’t mean we stall. It just means we build with intention.

We need to know what we know, define what we don’t, and decide which unknowns are worth leaving space for.

The scientific method can be a tool here—not for perfection, but for awareness. It helps us name the unknowns instead of pretending they don’t exist. It gives us permission to say, “I don’t know that yet—but I’ve put a branch here to come back to.”

This is the opposite of perfectionism.

This is about designing for resilience.

When you ignore the root cause long enough, the symptom becomes the process.

And suddenly, four teams are stuck in redundant meetings, interpreting the same data differently—because no one stopped to name the trunk, or the tusk, or the tail. And no one realized they were all holding the same damn elephant.

Creative Systems Thinking: Remixing What Already Exists

Some people love a blank canvas. For me, creativity has never been about unbridled imagination or starting from scratch.

I’m more like the DJ Shadow of process. Give me the pieces. A broken workflow. A forgotten workaround. A string of support tickets pointing to something deeper. I’ll dissect it, understand it, and remix it into something that works for the people it touches.

It’s not about chasing every rabbit hole—it’s about surveying the terrain. Not to solve everything now, but to make space for what we might need later.

I think about this a lot as an experiential builder. I walk the path. I touch the edges. I figure out where things break—but that doesn’t need to hold progress up. If we align the work properly, that discovery can happen while everything else moves forward.

This takes a beginner’s mindset. It means not assuming the structure is sacred just because we’ve inherited it. What if we carved the path more thoughtfully? What if that problem we’re all patching around... didn’t even need to exist?

If we were designing an OS today, would we still call it a "desktop"? Would we still mimic filing cabinets and folders if those metaphors no longer served us?

We build with what we know—but we grow when we stretch just outside that boundary.

Solving for the System, Not the Symptom

Real systems thinking lives in that stretch zone. Not in guessing all the answers, but in surfacing better questions.

In noticing when the process is the problem.

In recognizing that every workaround we inherit came from someone solving a local pain without a global view.

In seeing not just the piece in front of us, but the whole elephant.

That’s where practical creativity shows up. Not just fixing problems. But reimagining the patterns that caused them.

Because remixing systems isn’t just a creative act—it’s a diagnostic one.

It lets us see what’s still working, what never did, and what might emerge when we stop solving symptoms and start seeing the whole.

That’s how we move faster—later, and save our future selves the headache. That’s how we build systems that work—because they were never designed in isolation. And that’s how creativity becomes not just a spark, but a strategy.