The Elephant Carver’s Secret:

With more than a hat-tip to George Bernard Shaw

“I take my little knife. I take a block of wood. And I cut away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant.”

Once, in India, there was an old woodcarver famous for carving elephants. Other people carved elephants too, but somehow his were more galumphing and trumpety. When a documentary crew asked what made his elephants so perfect, his answer was beautifully simple: he removed everything that wasn’t elephant.

That old carver understood something we’re forgetting in business: real creativity isn’t about adding features, tactics, or complexity. It’s about having the intelligence to cut away everything that doesn’t solve the core problem. And that kind of thinking takes something increasingly rare: time to see what others miss.

The Problem-Solver’s Paradox

Business creativity has always been about problem-solving first, aesthetics second. The best marketing campaigns don’t just look clever, they solve real business challenges.

The best products don’t just have more features; they solve customer problems more elegantly. The best strategies don’t just sound impressive; they address and overcome competitive disadvantages.

But somewhere along the way, we began to confuse speed with intelligence, volume with value, and complexity with sophistication.

The carver knew better.

Before each cut, he studied the wood. He understood the grain, saw the natural strengths and weaknesses, and identified what the material wanted to become.

Only then did he begin removing what didn’t belong.

Business creativity requires the same patient intelligence. Understanding the market grain. Seeing customer needs others miss—recognising which problems matter and which are just noise.

The Science of Slower Thinking

(Without Getting Lost in the Weeds)

Here’s what neuroscience tells us about creative problem-solving in business: our brains need time to make unexpected connections. The “aha” moments that solve complex problems happen when three networks collaborate: the part that generates ideas, the part that evaluates them, and the part that decides what deserves attention.

This process can’t be rushed.

Creative insights often emerge during downtime after intense focus, which explains why breakthrough solutions usually come to light in unexpected moments, such as during showers, walks, or coffee breaks, rather than in back-to-back meetings.

However, our business culture is increasingly penalising this kind of thinking. We reward quick answers over deep understanding. We promote people who make decisions quickly, not necessarily those who make the best decisions. We measure activity over insight.

The result? A generation of business leaders with powerful tools but diminished problem-solving muscles.

The Speed Trap: When Fast Becomes Expensive

McKinsey research reveals something counterintuitive: companies that make decisions faster often make better decisions, but only when they use good decision-making processes. Speed as an outcome of clear thinking is valuable. Speed as a substitute for thinking is disastrous.

Consider the real cost of “move fast and break things” when applied beyond software development:

• Marketing campaigns that damage brand reputation because no one asked, “What could go wrong?”

• Product launches that fail because teams rushed past understanding the customer's jobs-to-be-done

• Strategic initiatives that waste millions because leaders confuse activity with progress

• Hiring decisions that create cultural debt for years

The carver understood that careless cuts couldn’t be undone. Each decision eliminated possibilities permanently. Business leaders seem to have forgotten this.

The AI Amplification Problem

Artificial intelligence has turbocharged our speed obsession, and the consequences are becoming visible. Recent research suggests that people feel less creative when using AI tools, even when the output appears impressive.

More concerning is that they may be becoming less creative.

AI can generate infinite options instantaneously. Marketing copy, product concepts, strategic frameworks, campaign ideas—all available on demand. But quantity isn’t creativity. Pattern matching isn’t problem-solving. And speed isn’t intelligence.

The real danger isn’t that AI will replace human creativity—it’s that humans will mistake AI output for creative thinking. When everyone has access to the same pattern-matching engines, trained on the same data, producing variations on the same themes, where’s the competitive advantage?

Consider what’s already happening:

• Amazon is flooded with AI-generated books that look professional but contain recycled content

• Marketing campaigns that feel eerily similar because they’re all optimising for the same AI-suggested approaches

• Business strategies that converge because everyone’s using the same analytical frameworks

• Product features that commoditise because they’re all generated from similar training data

This isn’t AI’s fault. AI is a powerful chisel. The problem is putting that chisel in the hands of those who never learned to see the elephant in the wood.

The Subtle Erosion of Business Intelligence

What worries me isn’t dramatic job displacement, it’s the gradual erosion of core business skills. Just as GPS made us worse at navigation and spell-check reduced our spelling ability, AI tools risk atrophying our problem-solving muscles.

When teams can generate a strategic plan in minutes, do they still learn to identify root causes? When marketing copy writes itself, do we still develop the ability to understand customer psychology? When AI suggests solutions, do we still build the pattern recognition to spot what won’t work?

The carver’s skill came from years of practice, of understanding materials, of developing intuition about what would and wouldn’t work. That knowledge couldn’t be downloaded—it had to be earned through experience.

Business creativity requires similar hard-won intelligence. Understanding market dynamics. Recognising customer behaviour patterns. Knowing which regulatory environments will shift. Sensing which competitive moves threaten which advantages.

AI can suggest tactics, but it can’t develop business judgment. It can generate options, but it can’t choose between them based on deep industry knowledge. It can optimise for metrics, but it can’t question whether those metrics matter.

The Process Problem: Rewarding the Wrong Things

Perhaps more dangerous than the tools themselves are the business processes that increasingly reward speed over depth. When performance reviews measure how quickly someone implements rather than how thoughtfully they think, we’ve inverted our priorities.

I’m seeing this everywhere:

• Quarterly planning cycles that prioritise immediate results over sustainable advantage

• Meeting cultures that confuse decision velocity with decision quality

• Promotion criteria that favour execution speed over strategic insight

• Budget processes that reward quick wins over compound improvements

The carver would be unemployable in such an environment. His methodical approach, his patient observation, and his willingness to study before cutting—all would be seen as bottlenecks rather than competitive advantages.

Yet his elephants were more galumphing and trumpety precisely because he refused to rush.

The Compound Cost of Shallow Thinking

Bad business decisions don’t just cost money—they compound into strategic disadvantage. Quick fixes create technical debt. Rushed products create customer experience debt. Superficial market analysis creates competitive debt.

The companies that understand this are building different muscles:

• Patagonia’s environmental stance wasn’t a quick marketing decision—it emerged from deep thinking about brand purpose and customer values

• Amazon’s long-term focus allows it to make decisions others can’t, because it’s optimising for different time horizons

• TSMC’s manufacturing dominance came from years of patient investment in capabilities others couldn’t quickly replicate

These companies practice strategic subtraction. They say no to opportunities that don’t serve their core mission. They eliminate complexity that doesn’t add value. They resist the urge to chase every trend.

Like the carver, they understand that competitive advantage comes from what you choose not to do as much as what you choose to do.

## Reclaiming Creative Intelligence

Here’s what gives me hope: the companies that learn to think deeply while others chase speed will have enormous advantages. While competitors generate similar AI-optimized solutions, thoughtful businesses will identify problems others miss entirely.

This requires rebuilding organizational capabilities:

### Individual Level

- **Developing pattern recognition** through diverse experience, not just data analysis

- **Building comfort with ambiguity** rather than rushing to premature clarity

- **Learning to question assumptions** that AI training data might embed

- **Practicing the discipline of subtraction** in analysis, strategy, and execution

### Team Level

- **Creating space for discovery** before jumping to solutions

- **Rewarding insight quality** alongside execution speed

- **Establishing processes that prevent groupthink** amplified by similar AI tools

- **Building diverse perspectives** that can see what algorithms miss

### Organizational Level

- **Measuring decision quality** over decision velocity

- **Investing in capabilities** that compound over time rather than tactics that deliver quick wins

- **Creating cultures** that reward depth alongside speed

- **Developing competitive advantages** that can’t be easily AI-generated

## The Future Belongs to Thoughtful Business Artists

The carver’s secret wasn’t his knife—it was his ability to see what others couldn’t. In a world where everyone has similar tools, vision becomes the ultimate differentiator.

Business creativity in the AI age isn’t about rejecting new technologies. It’s about using them thoughtfully. It’s about maintaining the human capabilities that machines can’t replicate: judgment, wisdom, creativity that comes from understanding rather than pattern matching.

The businesses that will thrive aren’t those that use AI fastest, but those that use it most intelligently. Not those that generate the most options, but those that choose the best ones. Not those that move quickest, but those that see furthest.

## Brevity Takes Time—And That’s Still True

Real business creativity—the kind that solves problems others miss, that creates sustainable advantage, that builds lasting value—takes time. Time to understand. Time to see patterns. Time to imagine possibilities. Time to choose what not to do.

This isn’t about slowing down everything. It’s about knowing when deep thinking serves better than quick thinking. When the stakes are high, when the problems are complex, when the solutions need to last—that’s when you need the carver’s patience.

The future belongs to business leaders who can tell the difference between urgency and importance, between activity and progress, between generating options and solving problems.

Like the old woodcarver, they’ll know the secret: competitive advantage comes not from what you can add, but from what you’re wise enough to cut away.

**The elephant was always there in the wood. The art was knowing what didn’t belong.**