Elephant Work - What Nature And Elephants Can Teach Us About Leadership In The Age Of AI

This essay is part of Creative Bureaucracy: Where Next & How?, the 2026 Creative Bureaucracy book conceived and edited by Charles Landry and Sebastian Turner. The publication brings together voices from around the world—including civil servants, designers, scholars and public innovators—to explore where public institutions should go next, and how they can get there.

In her essay, Lisa Witter examines why wisdom, care and human judgement will become more important—not less—in an AI-driven world.

By Lisa Witter

Published: 24 July 2026

I grew up obsessed with elephants.

Even as a kid, I sensed that elephants carried something the rest of the animal kingdom did not. Dumbo, the little Disney elephant, flew on the very ears the world told him were a defect. Then I watched them paint, yes, paint, with brushes on canvas at my local zoo. Chai. Bamboo. Watoto. And when I finally saw one in the wild in South Africa at twenty-five, what struck me most was not the size. It was their enormous power, held so quietly.

In a world racing toward artificial intelligence, I keep coming back to elephants. I think they have something to teach us, and I think leaders should pay attention.

Nature as a teacher

I have long believed that nature is one of the most underused sources of leadership insight. Not because nature is always wise or moral, but because it reveals patterns of adaptation, survival, and relationship that leaders ignore at their peril.

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, where volcanoes press up against oldgrowth rainforests, the ocean on one side and desert on the other. Nature is not a backdrop but a presence. It was impossible to grow up in that landscape and not feel it had something to teach.

Chief Seattle, the leader of the Duwamish and Suquamish peoples whose land I grew up on, is widely credited with an idea that has never left me: we do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children. It carries something true about leadership. How we lead today is shaped by what came before and by what we leave behind.

Human institutions are relatively young. The problems leaders face nownavigating threat, staying steady, adapting with integrity, rebuilding trust—are problems nature has been working on for millions of years longer than we have.

Nature does not theorize. It shows what survives. Its intelligence was not downloaded; it was earned through the consequences of living and dying. That is a different kind of knowing from anything a machine can generate.

Which brings me back to elephants, and to what I have started calling “elephant work”.

What the elephant brain might teach us

The elephant brain appears to be built for depth. Its neurons are markedly larger and more sparsely arranged, thought to support slower, more integrative processing rather than rapid-fire response. Not faster. Deeper.

Three elements of their brain stand out.

Elephants recognize themselves in mirrors. At the very least, it suggests a level of self-recognition that most other animals do not show. While AI can process images with extraordinary precision, it has never actually looked at anything.

They also appear to mourn. Researchers have documented elephants returning to the bones of other elephants years later, touching the remains, lingering. It looks like a ritual of memory with loss and attachment woven through it. AI stores everything, but has felt nothing.

The third thing is the one that interests me most, and to understand it, you have to meet the matriarch.

The matriarch’s wisdom

Elephant societies are matriarchal. The oldest female leads not because she is the strongest, but because she remembers. More than that, she seems to have done something with what she remembers that no amount of processing power can replicate—turned it into wisdom.

Wisdom is not simply knowing more. It is judgment shaped by consequence and reflection: the ability to read a situation not only for what it is, but for what it means, what it could become, and what it will cost if you get it wrong.

Research found that matriarchs aged sixty and older are far better at reading danger—recognizing male lions as more threatening than females. Younger matriarchs often got that wrong. The information was the same. The difference was in how it was interpreted. At minimum, that suggests that experience, over time, can deepen judgment in ways raw information alone does not.

AI has information in vast quantities. But information and wisdom are not the same thing. In our excitement about the former, we risk undervaluing the latter.

The matriarch did not download information about lion behaviour. She lived it: the fear, the choices, the cost. When she leads the herd away from danger, she is not retrieving data. She is acting from within an experience that never fully left her.

We can build tools that process information faster than any human alive. What we cannot build is a tool that has lived through anything. AI cannot bring to this moment the weight of having been here before.

The matriarch’s authority comes not just from what she knows, but from what she has become through knowing it. I am not sure any AI model has that. The judgment that can hold a frightened group together and decipher which threat is the real one, is wisdom through experience. It cannot be outsourced. It can only be earned, slowly and often painfully, over time.

What elephant work is in the age of AI

Elephant work is a part of leadership AI can assist, but not replace.

It is not just producing something that sounds smart in five seconds. It is the slower, deeper work of turning experience into judgment; of reading what is happening beneath the surface; of carrying consequence and building trust. It is sensing what is brittle, what is unsaid, what is escalating, and what is ethically at stake. It is knowing when to move, when to wait, when to reassure, when to tell the truth plainly, and when to absorb fear rather than amplify it. It is helping people through uncertainty without performing certainty.

It is also the work of carrying consequences. Making the call when the information is incomplete. Living with the outcome. Learning from it. Being changed by it. Coming back wiser the next time.

And in the age of AI, elephant work matters more than ever.

AI can assist with judgment by decluttering, creating more time and space for it, and possibly sharpening the inputs into it. But it cannot earn it. It has never had to calm a frightened team, rebuild trust after breaking it, or look someone in the eye after making the wrong call.

Those are not inefficiencies. They are the job.

The real leadership challenge now is not deciding whether to use AI. Of course, we should use it. The challenge is to use it in ways that protect and deepen human judgment rather than replace the very capacities leadership most depends on.

And since AI is making many parts of leadership faster, cheaper, and easier to fake, the thing that will increasingly separate serious leaders from performative ones is whether they have judgment, and whether they use AI to deepen it rather than simulate it.

What Dumbo knew

Dumbo’s ears were not a defect. They were exactly what he needed to fly. What the world read as a liability turned out to be the thing that set him apart.

What we are now tempted to dismiss as too slow, too emotional, or too human may be exactly what leadership most needs.

We are building machines that can do almost everything a leader can do, except be changed by it. Except carry the weight of it. Except stand at the bones of what came before and understand that this matters, and that moving forward well means honouring it.

Use AI for what it is good for: buying time. But do not confuse assistance with judgment, or fluency with wisdom, or speed with leadership.

Then spend that saved time doing the work only humans can do.

That is elephant work.

And in the age of AI, it may be one of the most important forms of leadership we have. The question is whether we will protect it before we get so enchanted by artificial intelligence that we forget what human intelligence is for.

ABOUT THE CREATIVE BUREAUCRACY FESTIVAL  

Public administration, too, has excellent, creative solutions for almost every challenge facing society — the Creative Bureaucracy Festival brings them to the stage and the people behind them into conversation. The festival, in the words of its President Charles Landry, stands for the shift from a "No, because" culture to a "Yes, if" culture that embraces new ideas with enthusiasm. Through the presentation of the Creative Bureaucracy Awards, the festival also aims to strengthen the public reputation of administration. The Global Forum of Public Service Leaders, which begins on the day before the festival, is the annual gathering of public sector leaders from around the world. The Young Bureaucrats Event addresses the next generation of creative talent in the public sector. Further information can be found at https://creativebureaucracy.org/. 

ABOUT THE BOOK — CREATIVE BUREAUCRACY: WHERE NEXT & HOW?

Creative Bureaucracy: Where Next & How? — The 1st Creative Bureaucracy Global Report 2026 brings together 24 contributors from government, academia, cities, philanthropy, design and public innovation to explore how far the idea of creative bureaucracy has travelled, whether it is making a tangible difference and where the movement should go next. Featuring internationally recognised thinkers and practitioners alongside leading voices from governments, cities and innovation organisations around the world, the report offers a broad range of perspectives on how public institutions can become more capable, humane, imaginative and effective. Its chapters examine themes including the future of the state, public-sector leadership, service design, implementation, civic imagination and the human qualities needed in governance, such as judgement, care, courage, playfulness and agency. Edited by Creative Bureaucracy Festival co-founders Charles Landry and Sebastian Turner, the report seeks to help shape a new operating logic for governance—one that combines imagination with implementation, experimentation with accountability, and public purpose with democratic trust. For more information, contact info@creativebureaucracy.org.