Elephants, Moons and Mirrors

Abstract

In a very real sense, everything we see is an illusion. Some of those illusions are man-made, while others are naturally occurring. When we look at an object, light bounces off it and produces two-dimensional, inverted images on our retina, which then travel along the optic nerve to the brain where they become a three-dimensional, “right way up picture” in our mind’s eye. To achieve that transformation, our brain interprets the data and the image we eventually perceive is a function of context, memory, genetics and motivations. Writing this book has been something akin to the process of human visual perception, although much slower! We started three years ago with some raw data — the basic idea and a book title. Our journey from the first meeting with the editor (“the basic premise is good, but the title is boring”) to the last conversation with a friend about the final chapter (“don’t make it too long”), has transformed that data into a richer, more colorful, and perhaps more useful interpretation than we envisaged at the beginning of our project. It has been a process that has confirmed a few things we believed, but has also highlighted a lot that we needed to consider and include. Our workshops and the in-depth interviews with leaders and their followers, academics and consultants, have provided the sort of reality and insight that have shaped and clarified the empirical (but sometimes opaque) perspective we had when first putting our fingers to keyboard.