the Beauty of Contradiction(If you haven't read The Elephant through the Knothole, you may want to read that first.) The three beggars each offered a radically different description of the elephant. The villager could not reconcile the contradicting stories in his mind and dismissed the opposing descriptions as logically incompatible and therefore obviously false. The young boy however was somehow able to grasp each of the three descriptions simultaneously, and comprehend that though they seem contradictory, they may be compatible. I cannot imagine what kind of floppy-cobra-tree creature the boy pictured in his imagination, but he was open-minded enough not to dismiss this fantastic creature right away and chose to believe the beggars’ descriptions of the elephant. Perhaps he realized that whatever he imagined this creature may look like, may not a completely accurate picture. This concept of realizing the limits of our perception is a critical step toward understanding reality. In his book “The Opposable Mind”, Roger Martin explains that by altering the way we think about our own perceptions and ideas, we can learn to become “Integrative Thinkers”. As integrative thinkers, we recognize that our perceptions are models of reality; they are not reality itself. Our models of reality represent some simplified subset of the attributes of reality.
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