How do you eat an elephant?

This was never mentioned afterwards, with what would you cut up the elephant? Because, you see, for that you would need at least a knife, an axe, a cleaver, a saw, or a chainsaw. I realised this in the middle of the Tasmanian rainforest.

Every day we travelled around 40-70 km, just one way, in the Tasmanian wilderness to tend to the placed bee colonies, or to „harvest” the honey. It was Leatherwood season, and there were also huge bushfires.

This meant that on the morning after the first forest fire, we had to remove about 20-30 smaller trees that had fallen across the road with a chainsaw. And we might have to do this again the same afternoon. This worked without any problems in a few minutes.

Then one day, when we thought all the trees that needed to fall onto the road had already fallen, the elephant was lying right in front of us in the road…

Gas cylinder maintenance hurdle — in the form of a 100-year-old Black tree.

The chain we had available for consumption, in this case a petrol chainsaw with a 55 cm guide bar, seemed insufficient. The importance of the chainsaw becomes less and less, when it gets stuck in the log.

Can we bring in larger resources from within the organisation? Can we organise a group? Can we involve specialists from other areas to successfully overcome the obstacle?

Let's go back to our elephant for a moment. If I haven't mentioned it already, I trained at a professional apiary. There must be a fork here somewhere to go with the knife!

After not too much searching, we lowered our forks from the back of the truck. It was written on our forklift that it was a MOFFETT M4, an all-terrain machine capable of lifting 2 tonnes. It's an essential part of every professional beekeeping setup.

A suitable tool for reorganising the maintenance plant

It wasn't easy even then. I'll share two interesting videos at the end of the article.

Lesson learned: we were able to solve it then because we had the expertise, the capability, and the necessary resources within the organisation.

If our friend Moffett hadn't been there, we would have had to deal with our problem at the cost of very high energy expenditure and risks, or we would have been left with the 40 radio frequency, where we would have had to call in outside experts.

In the life of an organisation, situations naturally arise when external resources need to be accessed. Wisdom lies in recognising this, or else hindering the organisation's progress by years through futile attempts.

Everyone will encounter an obstacle they cannot overcome alone, lacking sufficient knowledge, resources, or financial means to bring in external support.

There will be elephants that no one will eat, because simply time and economic interest do not support it.

Tools for dismembering an elephant

P.S. I recommend this article to my teacher, Csaba Bereczki, with whom the elephant quote was often heard. I know that although we didn't explicitly say it, he gave us tools, but under his guidance, everyone sharpened their own cutting tools, or acquired new ones to go with them.