The Elephant In the Room by Diana McLain Smith
- Lars Christensen
- Jul 10
- 10 min read
I finished this book in June 2025. I recommend this book 2/10.
Why you should read this book:
The book is about how to repair relationships that go sour in business. The book starts with the example of Steve Jobs and John Sculley, where the result was Steve Jobs being fired from his own company, Apple. The framework in the book is pointed at a situation where both candidates are willing to work on changing the relationship.
Get your copy here.
🚀 The book in three sentences
What we many times like as the other person's strength, and know is our weakness, can over time be what we dislike when crisis hits and we get stuck in our frame of mind.
If a relationship is getting bad, don't wait for the other person to take action.
When you feel accused or attacked, try to really understand what the other person is saying and where they are coming from.
✍️ My favorite quotes
Abraham Lincoln said, "I don't like the man. I must get to know him better."
📝 My notes and thoughts
P46. Each person might recognize they should have done things different, but at the end of the road—only identifying all the other person's faults. And, thereby, no vision on how they possibly could continue. It is like a divorce.
P54. Unless people seek to understand how they are both contributing to outcomes no one likes, they will be forever caught in the same paradoxical game in which the more individual responsibility is sought, the less individual responsibility is found.
P65. Troubles—challenges, conflicts, pressures, failures, mistakes—are inevitable. How we see and handle them with others is a matter of choice, even if made unconsciously or automatically. When people take an individual perspective, they assume they alone are right, that this is obvious, and that others don't get it because they are either mad or bad. This perspective leads to blaming and waiting games that erode personal responsibility and tear at the threads of even good relationships. In contrast, when people take a relational perspective, they assume that others see things they miss, that reasonable people can disagree, and that it's important that people work together to build relationships strong enough to weather the troubles they will face.
Abraham Lincoln said, "I don't like the man. I must get to know him better."
P81. The Ladder of Reflection:
Step 1: Look at what you're both doing.
Step 2: Figure out how you together create undesired results.
Step 3: Focus on patterns, not personalities or motives.
Step 4: Predict how patterns will affect learning and growth.
Step 5: Alter patterns that undermine learning and growth.
P89. To improve a relationship, people need to look not only at each other but at the repetitive patterns that define the anatomy or structure of a relationship. Only then can people see what they otherwise find so hard to imagine: that they're not nearly as helpless or constrained as they think they are.
P101. All relationships have an informal structure that emerges over time out of repetitive patterns. Four interlocking elements make up that structure:
Actions and Reactions. Patterns form out of people's intersecting actions and reactions.
Frames. Frames lead patterns to repeat until they form a more enduring informal structure. It refers to our interpretations of ourselves in relation to others and the goals we set as a result.
Social Contexts. Social contexts form the contextual backdrop against which some triggering event occurs, prompting a need to respond. Roles, resources, time pressures, and historical events.
Behavioral Repertoires. Behavioral repertoires define the range of responses people have at their disposal for framing and acting in different social contexts, once triggered by some event.
P117. What we many times like as the other person's strength, and know is our weakness, can over time be what we dislike when crisis hits and we get stuck in our frame of mind.
P121. No leader can invest in all relationships all the time. We all have to make choices, sometimes hard choices. In making those choices, it helps to think of relationships along two dimensions: how important the relationship is, and the degree of interdependence between the people. When both are high, leaders should treat the relationship like a strategic asset and invest accordingly.
P121. The Investment Matrix.
P126. The Sequencing Matrix.
P127. Ask yourself:
To what extent will changes in the relationship free you up to do your job more easily and effectively?
To what extent will changes in the relationship make it easier for you to make decisions and take actions together more quickly and wisely?
P133. When people wait for the other person in a relationship to change, they're usually in for a long wait. Odds are that the person is also waiting for them. Think of the leader who keeps looking to her second-in-command to take more initiative so that she doesn't have to tell him what to do, while he keeps looking to her to stop controlling things so that he can take more initiative. Each one waits for the other to make the first move.
P135: Principle 1: Use Dual Vision to Set Your Sights:
Many change efforts, whether designed for people or for organizations, swing back and forth between two poles. Some promise more change than they can deliver in a short time: personal transformation in a couple of days or cultural transformation in a couple of months. Others aspire for far too little: a meager handful of insights after months of analysis. Similarly, some change efforts focus only on practical results—"We'll cut costs! Beat the competition! Save time and money!"—while others speak only to existential aspirations: "You'll have a sense of purpose! You'll be fulfilled! You'll feel more connected!" For people to be motivated enough to invest over time, they need to set goals that are ambitious and realistic on the one hand, and practically important and personally meaningful on the other.
Practice 1: Be ambitious and Realistic.
Practice 2: Set goals that are practically important and personally meaningful.
P138. Principle 2: Build Resilience While Taking Stock:
Most people don't expect a change effort to be perfect, but they do expect observable, meaningful progress. If they can't see that progress, get confused over whether it's real, or get unduly thrown by setbacks, they'll grow discouraged and stop trying. To keep people motivated, you need to take stock of progress and use any setbacks to build resilience over time. You can accomplish this by assessing your progress in ways that build confidence and by putting setbacks, mistakes, and failures to work.
Practice 1: Build confidence by assessing progress. People get discouraged about how far they still have to go, while forgetting how much they have already overcome—remind them of that.
Practice 2: Put setbacks, mistakes, and failures to work. Reacting poorly to mistakes is simply another mistake. Remind people about the scientist mindset.
P139. Principle 3: Put the Fun Back in the Dysfunctional:
You can't improve a relationship without exploring delicate issues or taking some emotional risks. At times, the endeavor may feel so weighty you'll want to take a pass. To lighten things up, look for opportunities to laugh at the unlaughable, and if you're running out of hope, create it.
Practice 1: Laugh at the unlaughable. Think of Lincoln telling stories during the darkest times of the Civil War. Think about how little this will matter in five years from now.
Practice 2: Create hope. When you act as if good things might follow, you're more apt to create the circumstances that justify and fulfill that hope. It is awfully hard to jump-start hope once pessimism sets in.
P141. When people wait for the other person in a relationship to change, they're in for a long wait. To improve a relationship, you need to focus on changing the relationship, not just yourself or the other person. By changing the relationship patterns that discourage risk-taking, you can accelerate individual change. Relationship change is more sustainable, even fun and fulfilling.
P151. How to assess your own relationships:
Identify a relationship that could make or break your success or that of your unit or organization.
Invite that person to join you in assessing the ways in which your relationship is making it easier and harder for each of you to succeed.
Focus your attention not just on each other but on your relationship.
Create a shared list of the challenges you'll have to master together and the pressures they'll generate for each of you.
Jointly asses the relationship's assets and liabilities relative to those challenges and pressures.
P166. How to map patterns of interaction:
Identify one or two interactions that illustrate the concerns raised in your relationship assessment from Step 1.
Capture the interaction by taping or taking close notes on what you each said and did and on what you each felt and thought at the time.
Describe in concrete terms what you each did (and did not do); do not speculate about what you were trying to do or intending to do.
Describe your reactions (what you were actually thinking and feeling at the time); do not justify, interpret, or explain them.
Organize your description into a map that shows how each of your actions contributed to reactions that make the other's actions more understandable.
Calibrate your map by modifying or adding to it on the basis of what happened in other interactions.
P170. How to design an action experiment:
Use the map you created in Step 2 to move outside the pattern that concerns you, so you can look back at it and see how it works.
Ask yourselves, what action can I take to make it hard for the other person to continue acting and reacting the way he or she does now?
Invent actions that lie outside the box defined by the patterns—actions that might put a monkey wrench in the way it works.
Even if the new actions look like the cure that makes the illness worse, try them. Right now, you just want to shake the pattern up and make it more amenable to change.
P180. How to freeze frame:
Stop in the heat of the moment and capture your partner's reactions (and your own) by asking an open-ended question such as, "What's going on?"
No matter how tempting, don't react to what you hear. You can't tell what your reactions—or your partner's reactions—are saying about you, him, or the relationship. Think of them as "data," and use them to uncover your frames.
To uncover your frames, ask yourselves, given the way I'm reacting, how must I be seeing myself, my partner, the situation, and my purpose in it?
Take a few moments to write down your answers before discussing them with each other. Then go back over them to make sure they're connected to what you felt, thought, and did.
Discuss what you've learned with each other without justifying your reactions or your frames. Stay focused on exploring and mapping how your frames intersect to maintain the interlocking actions you mapped in Stage 1.
P185. How to invent new frames:
Look at the map created in Step 1, depicting how your frames interlock to keep the old pattern in place.
Consider the self-reinforcing nature of your frames—that is, how your frames lead you to act in ways that reinforce the other's frame of you, and so on.
Help each other invent frames that will create a new pattern. The best frames are those that make it easier for both of you to be at your best.
Come up with things that you can say to yourself in the heat of the moment to bring the new frame to mind.
P194. How to design a frame experiment:
Look at the frames you invented at the beginning of this stage and ask the question, If I thought this frame was true, what would I say or do?
Let your partner know when you're experimenting and ask for his or her help in interpreting the results.
When interpreting the results, don't look to confirm old frames; look for even subtle shifts—either in what happened or in your experience.
If you can't find any, look at the actions you took and see if they really do follow from the new frame. If they do, reconsider the frame you invented to see if it really is new or just a slight variation on an old theme.
Depending on what you learn, either stay the course or go back and redesign the experiment.
P209. How to revisit past events:
Figure out what kind of help you need to make the most of this step and be sure to get it.
With that help, identify the historical events that most remind you of this relationship.
Write down what happened in those earlier moments and what you took or learned from them. Put aside what you wrote for twenty-four hours.
Go back and read what you wrote; then extract from your account any stories, propositions, values, and practical strategies you see, as I did here.
Explore how the knowledge you've built out of the past experience is affecting your development and your relationships, including this one.
P212. "At first, I broke out in a sweat. But then I said to myself, 'No, this guy's struggling with something. He doesn't know he's putting me in a box by asking me to prove something that can't be proved. Maybe if I find out what he's worried about, we start to get out of the box."
P223. How to restructure experiential knowledge:
Figure out what kind of help you need to make the most of these steps, and be sure to get it.
Ask yourself, in what ways are my circumstances and relationships different now from what I experienced earlier in life?
Ask yourself, in what ways am I different today than I was earlier in life (aside from my waistline)?
Review the stories, propositions, values, and strategies you wrote down in Step 1.
Ask yourself, how would I revise my stories, propositions, values, and strategies so they better fit my relationships and circumstances today?
Write down what you would like to do differently in your most important relationships as a result of what you've learned.
P228. How to return to the future:
Capture the progress you've made to date—both on the business front and on the relationship front.
Take stock of what you've accomplished and figure out a way to celebrate together.
Identify the objectives you would each like to achieve in the future and anticipate the challenges those objectives will pose for your relationship.
Set the terms of your new relationship by making explicit commitments to each other.
Make sure the commitments specify what you will actually do to sustain the changes you've made and the master future challenges.
Make sure the commitments specify how you will help each other when you need it.
Going forward, look to each other for help when either of you falls short of your commitments or finds them hard to meet.
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