Elephants and Developer Enablement
Tuning the levers of software engineering performance
There is an ancient parable out of India about an elephant. It is a story of blind men that, never having come across an elephant, seek one to find out what it is like. Elephants are rather large though, so the blind men spread out to touch the elephant and share their thoughts.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, they each share a different perspective. One touches a tusk and thinks an elephant is like a spear. Another touches the trunk and thinks it is like a snake. And so on and so on. All six blind men report a completely different experience.
A non-blind observer off to the side can clearly see it is an elephant. The blind men however, going only by what they feel, insist their perceptions are the correct. Sometimes this parable is shared to describe how different religious traditions experience God, and the analogy has even been extended into the realms of quantum physics and biology.
Because each person’s experience is limited to just one part of the elephant, there is no consensus on what an elephant is like. They are encountering observer bias, leading to wildly different results. Perhaps German physicist, Werner Heisenberg, had it right when he said:
“We have to remember that what we…
