What is a Heffalump?
I should probably give more credit to my colleagues at the Festival of Faith & Writing planning table for their help in other parts of my life. As I sit with Jennifer, Jane, Lauren, Debra, and Kelli, discussing Festival logistics, I am being coached in a particular way of looking at the world, a way that connects belief and story, love and language, in ways that are empowering for other parts of my work in the world.
For example, when it comes to writing my weekly Substack helping mid-level leaders cultivate good working community through effective internal communication, I can quickly spot connections between good stories and good workplace communication. (What follows is an adaptation of a piece you can read in full here).
TLDR? The ways we use stories at work can connect people to important goals and active their best work—or it can trigger their heffalumps.
What in the heff is a hellalump?
I’m borrowing this word from an A.A. Milne story, which opens with Christopher Robin remarking casually that he’d just seen a heffalump the other day. Having no clue as to what such a creature might be, Winnie the Pooh and Piglet nonetheless resolve to capture one. They concoct a plan: they’ll put an alluring pot of honey at the bottom of a pit. But the plan is foiled when, in the night, Pooh gets hungry, clambers down into the trap, and gets his head stuck in the honeypot. Arriving at dawn, Piglet is terrified by the hubbub at the bottom of the pit as Pooh struggles to free himself. “Help, help, a Herrible Hoffalump!” he yells, “Hoff, Hoff, a Hellible Horralump!” He runs off to Christopher Robin, who eventually figures out what has happened and has the heartiest laugh imaginable.
My first thought in trying to connect this story with the world of work is, Don’t be Christopher Robin. That is, don’t use language casually, confusingly, or recklessley in ways that deactivate or dis-activate the people around you.
But on further thought, I think the better advice is, remember you’re not talking to your people; you’re talking to their heffalumps.
Let’s say you need to communicate a new procedure or a new project. What’s the best way to inform your team about this new thing?
Wrong question. The better question is, How are you going to let their heffalumps know about it? Think of a “heffalump” as how people respond to a new and unknown thing. You can expect to deal with at least four kinds of emotional responses.
Naming the heffalumps in the room
Part of the charm of A.A. Milne’s made-up word heffalump is that it sounds like elephant. (When Piglet dreams about a heffalump, Milne’s illustrations show an elephant jumping on his bed). Identifying different species of heffalump can help you craft your message better:
The Piglets will not be able to hear your instructions, because this new information provokes them to run away. More precisely, their feelings are so intense that they’ll do anything else but engage the information. Their emotional posture in the face of what you have to say is avoidance.
Other team members will obsess on the process details, asking a million questions. These are the Poohs who get their heads stuck in the pot. They might feel fear or enthusiasm or a desire to impress everybody else. But whatever they feel, they are fused with those feelings. They become them. Their response pattern is adhesion.
Still other team members will respond to your message with erratic comments. These are the first responders—no, first reactors—who bounce unpredictably from idea to idea, obscuring the point, confusing the communication. Think of them as roughly like Tigger: their emotional response pattern is agitation.
Finally, you have the sour, the cynical, the acerbic, who are way too confident they know what’s really going on in this new process. They see through every new set of instructions to yet another power grab by senior leadership. Who knows? Sometimes, these Eeyores are right! But you’ll experience these acerbic responders as obstructive in everyday work.
Scripting responses to heffalumps
To adapt the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, we might say that everybody has a rider and a heffalump. The rider is the employee’s rationality. It’s their capability to receive information and act on it coherently and predictably. The heffalump, in contrast, is their emotional response to a situation. Most of the time, when we’re talking to our coworkers, we tend to talk to their riders. But it’s their heffalumps that actually run things. (As Haidt would say, the riders are mostly there to justify the choices the heffalumps are making).
As a leader squeezed between the demands of the accountancy department and your team, you want your internal communication to build trust, to transform conflict, to deepen collaboration, and to get some seriously good sh#t done. But to do all that, you’re going to need a mode/switch: always talk to the heffalump in the room.
You see what I’m doing, right? I’m taking a funny story and using it to shape how we script interactions with people in practical situations. Milne’s story, in other words, can guide conversations with very different sorts of people.
If you’re talking to someone whose feelings are so intense that they feel like the only thing they do is to pull a Piglet (i.e., running the hellalump away), you’re going to need to use language that helps them to be present to what’s here and now. Try saying this:
Script: I know, it’s tempting to think, this new process is going to kill our productivity! But we don’t have to go there. Let’s just concentrate on the steps for a minute and see if this new process doesn’t save us some time. If it doesn’t work, we can always go back and say so.
Think of this as cuing the avoiders on your team to be present to what’s going on now—not on some catastrophe in the future. You’re also communicating the provisionality of organizational processes. People often forget that provisionality can provide agency.
Some of your team members will not take the new information but will instead stick their heads down in their own feelings. These folks are (to use the language of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) so fused to their feelings that they can’t process the new process. Try saying this:
Script: There’s a part of me that’s irritated by changes in our process. There’s a voice in my head that says, “New processes NEVER make things better.” But you know, I gotta admit, pretty often that voice is just flat out wrong.
What you’re doing by saying something like that is modeling for your team how to put distance between themselves and their feelings. By implying (with something like Internal Family Systems theory to back you up) that everybody has noisy brains with lots and lots of “parts” speaking up, you’re helping your stuck-in-the-pot adhesives to practice discernment about which of their internal voices they should trust and which they should ask to hold up for a moment.
Other members of your team will be reactionary. Actually, this is another kind of avoidance. Instead of being curious about themselves and their feelings, they react in a loud, dramatic, chaotic way. Try saying this to the agitators:
Script: Look, can we try an experiment? Let’s just take the process under advisement, try it out, but don’t give it anything. Just shrug. Just move on. Just no-big-deal-it.
This “gray rock” technique derives from the work of Dr. Jessica Borushok, who suggests that helping people under-respond to aversive experiences can actually help create a flexible engagement. The spiritual writer Rowan Williams calls this “writing in the dust,” in reference to how Jesus responded when the religious leaders of his day over-reacted to something. He just bent over from the waist and wrote something in the dust till everybody settled down.
Finally, there are the acerbics, the sourpusses, who often struggle to see a task through, because they’re so busy seeing through their tasks. Try saying this:
Script: What would happen if we try this new process for a week? What do you honestly think will happen?
This script obviously sets up a sequel in the next meeting. But the script also helps the cynics do something called tracking. Good questions about expectations challenge them to actually study the situation and then report back. If the new process actually doesn’t work, that’s valuable intel. But their tracking might persuade them to accept what they might otherwise dismiss. Note, too, that this script honors the expertise of the cynics, but it redirects that expertise not towards the goal of deconstruction but towards the goal of seeing what’s functional for the team.
Helping heffalumps with humor
It’s tempting to think of the literary work of the Festival of Faith & Writing as being far removed from the mundane and the logistical aspects of life and work. But as my colleagues around the Festival planning table would tell you: stories animate a lot of our practical concerns.
My colleagues might add that such an insight keeps us from treating stories as lofty and esoteric. Sometimes they are, of course. But stories are also humble and earthy. I love how the Winnie the Pooh story ends. Piglet dashes to Christopher Robin’s house and drags him to the pit where Pooh is slowly knocking himself senseless from inside his own honeypot. When Christopher Robin realizes what’s going on, he responds what Piglet’s heffalump with laughter.
Some laughter can be cruel, of course, But laughter can also be a close-to-the-ground response to a situation where no explicit advice will do the job.
By making room for wisdom and laughter in life and work, stories do a contagious thing. They make shareable our humanity, our common vulnerability, and our almost universal tendency to heffalump.
