I recently joined a professional book club focused on exploring the deeper principles behind behavior change, learning, and leadership. Our first book, Talk to the Elephant by Julie Dirksen, offers practical and often eye-opening ways to understand why people behave the way they do—and why change is so hard.
Talking through the book with others led me to want to explore deeper, and so I’m creating a blog companion series. Each entry in this series reflects on one chapter and applies its core ideas to my world of people management, highlighting where behavior change and managerial challenges intersect.
Understanding the Elephant and the Rider
Dirksen’s book focuses on designing learning experiences that lead to real behavior change. It immediately appealed to me as an instructional designer and as a leadership consultant. The link between behavior change and a manager’s ability to help their team navigate organizational change is clear, especially when leaders must steer teams through uncertain transitions.
Dirksen opens the book with a metaphor drawn from psychology: the elephant and the rider. It’s a helpful way to understand the two systems of thought that shape how we make decisions and respond to change. The rider represents our logical, planning-oriented side—the part of us that sets goals and outlines next steps. The elephant, on the other hand, is our emotional, intuitive side. It’s big, powerful, and hard to steer unless it’s actually bought into where we’re going.
This chapter sets the stage for the rest of the book by reminding us that people need connection before they can effectively move toward behavior change. And when we, as managers, try to lead change using only facts, charts, or timelines, we’re talking to the rider while the elephant stays firmly in place.
That dynamic shows up in organizational change as well. In these conversations, I often draw from the ADKAR model, a widely used change management framework developed by Prosci, which outlines five stages of successful change: Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement.
When leaders focus only on communicating the change clearly (Knowledge), they often miss the earlier stages—Awareness and Desire—where emotional alignment begins. That’s where the elephant needs the most attention. This first chapter brings that concept into sharp focus, and several takeaways are especially relevant for managers who must lead through uncertainty.
Key Takeaways
- Logic alone won’t drive behavior. Explaining a change clearly doesn’t guarantee that people will follow it. Teams need emotional clarity before they’re ready to move.
- People care about different things. Even when the logic seems obvious, everyone filters that information through their own experiences, fears, and motivations. You have to ask what matters to them.
- Connection builds momentum. A clear rollout plan won’t gain traction if people don’t feel seen. When people recognize themselves in the story you're telling, they begin to move with you.
Applying This to People Management
Imagine you are informed that your research team is about to get integrated as part of the Product team. You are tasked with championing this transition. From a strategic standpoint, the move makes sense: Product leaders want tighter integration between research insights and feature development, and aligning under one department should streamline decision-making.
You gather your team to discuss the upcoming merger and find that the team is resistant. Over the years, Product has repeatedly launched features without their input, leaving researchers feeling sidelined. A similar restructure a few years back shook their confidence in organizational changes. No one says it out loud in the room, but the emotional memory remains. As the manager, you might assume that laying out the logic will ease concerns. But they’re not resisting because they don’t understand. They’re resisting because they do — and what they remember doesn’t feel safe.
This is the moment where managers often feel stuck. You’ve communicated the “what” and the “why.” But nothing seems to move. This is where the elephant shows up.
In coaching conversations, I encourage managers in this position to stop looking for the perfect message and start creating space for conversation. Ask what people are worried about. Name the past experience openly. Invite people to talk through what this change feels like before asking them to align with it. Creating this space strengthens trust and allows for progress to be made.
You may not have control over the change itself, but you do have control over how your team experiences it. How you show up in those early conversations influences whether the team sees the change as something being done to them or something they can navigate with you. When you give people room to name their elephants, you make space for shared understanding—and for momentum to build from within the team, not just from the top.
A Parting Thought
If you’re leading your team through something new right now, ask yourself: Are you speaking to the part of them that plans, or the part of them that feels? You’ll need both, but if you only look at the logical side, the elephants in the room will refuse to move.
Next up
Chapter 2 – A Systems View. We’ll explore what’s really behind stuck behavior and why the right intervention isn’t always training.
