Can You Find The Gorilla in This Picture?

No one likes to admit defeat, least of all the Consultant Debunking Unit (CDU). But even this investigative outfit, famous for debunking tall tales told by consultants, has encountered a few nuts that its crack team simply couldn't, um, crack. This is the story of how one such nut led the CDU on a hunt to the wilds of Australia, through the African subcontinent, and thence deep into the heart of darkness -- or, in this case, The Heart of Leadership: 12 Practices of Courageous Leaders (Executive Excellence Publishing, 2000), by consultant Robert E. Staub II.

The journey started at CDU headquarters, in the "X-Files," a drawer filled with notes on strange and inexplicable consulting phenomena. One of these files, No. 13, had been perplexing the CDU since 1994, when the CDU heard Ross Perot say to Larry King, "The big gorilla on the table right now is turning health care over to the federal government." Immediately, the CDU's misplaced-metaphor alarm went off! The phrase "the gorilla on the table" clearly suggested the existence of a very important, inescapable issue that, for various reasons, no one would discuss. The question for the CDU was this: If there were, literally, a gorilla on the table, how could you not discuss it? The CDU initiated an investigation -- but no one would discuss it.

Then the CDU came across these words in Staub's book: "A maxim in big-game hunting states that the larger an animal is, the harder it is to see." The animal, Staub says, "is so obvious that it 'disappears' or is mistaken for something benign and familiar." His point: "Most of the time we are blind to the obvious, failing to see the forces that are actively shaping our ability to compete and succeed both today and tomorrow."

Could it be true? Had Staub provided the missing link? Could it be that the reason people don't discuss the gorilla on the table is that they just don't see it? By Staub's logic, the gorilla is so large and so obvious that it disappears, or is mistaken for something benign and familiar -- say, a desk lamp. A gorilla mistaken for a lamp? Something smelled funny in the monkey house. Either the gorilla puzzle was solved, or Staub's "maxim" was, itself, a case for the CDU.

"At first, this seems like a ridiculous statement," Staub concedes in his book. "But it stands up to scrutiny when you take the science of perception into account. There is a strong tendency for the mind to turn a large, obvious entity into something familiar, blending it into the natural background. . . . A large grizzly at first glance or two might be taken to be a large bush or boulder. The hardest animal to see is an elephant!"

As it turns out, the hardest animal to see isn't an elephant -- it's an elephant expert. The CDU sought to track down the renowned researcher and environmentalist Cynthia Moss, founder and director of the Amboseli Elephant Research Project, finally locating her at her home near Amboseli National Park, in Kenya. Big game is one thing -- Moss wasn't game at all. "You're making fun of elephants, and I won't participate," Moss said. The CDU tried to explain its scientific intentions, but, like the three blind men in the old story about the elephant, Moss turned a blind eye to the vision project, shouting, "I won't do it!"

The CDU refocused, and turned a keen eye on Iain Douglas-Hamilton, a pioneering elephant researcher who follows the herds in and around the Samburu National Reserve, in Kenya. Is it true that the larger an animal is, the harder it is to see? "That's ludicrous," said Douglas-Hamilton. "Large animals can't help but be conspicuous." So if an elephant doesn't hide in plain sight, where does it hide? "It goes into the brush. They're pretty hard to see when they do that."

The CDU decided to head into the brush itself. It bushwhacked its way to South Africa, where it caught up with Kruger National Park veterinarian Roy Bengis, who has worked for 22 years tending the park's baboons, buffalo, leopards, lions, rhinos, and other animals large and small. "I suppose that if you're a total inexperienced dilettante blundering around in the bush without paying attention, you could miss a big animal directly in front of you," Bengis said. "Otherwise, they're pretty hard to miss. There are so many clues: tracks, snorting and growling -- not to mention the smell. Fresh elephant dung has a very strong odor. Elephant bulls that are in musth -- when their testosterone levels are high, and they're going aggressively after the ladies -- urinate on their back legs. That's an odor you absolutely can't miss, even from 200 or 300 meters away. Lions have a pungent predator odor. By the way, what should you do if an elephant charges?" What? "Take away his credit card," said Bengis.