Metaphors

"The deep structure of thought is based on feelings, memories, beliefs and values, and is revealed through our behaviors and our choice of words. In individuals, this deep structure is referred to as our personality; in organizations, it is called 'corporate culture.'" — Roger Ellerton

"The challenge facing modern managers is to become accomplished in the art of using metaphor to find new ways of seeing, understanding, and shaping their actions." — Gareth Morgan

Metaphors are not just poetic turns of phrase used to embellish speech with an ornamental flourish, they are fundamental to how we perceive and think about the world. Metaphors help us to understand our experiences and create meaning—who we take ourselves to be, what the nature of our work is, how we orient in relationships, how we get stuck, what challenges feel like, and what feels possible (to name a few!). As unique observers, we experience the world through the intersection of language, emotion, and the body. Our knowing is highly experiential and metaphor is one of the primary ways we create conceptual coherence across experiences.

What is the pig? via Garath Morgan

I love this illustration from Gareth Morgan's book, Imaginization, where we see a pig surrounded by unique observers. Taken as a whole, the question, "What is the pig?" reveals the complexity of what at first glance seems pretty simple. The pig is not just an animal, of course, it is in fact many things all at once, depending on who you ask. For the artist the pig might be a muse, to the child a best friend, to the butcher a livelihood, to the philosopher a figment of the imagination. How each person imagines the pig will reveal certain aspects of how they see and interact with the world, while obscuring others. For example, the child who sees the pig as a best friend will not have access to the possibility of the pig being a form of sustenance.

The same is true for organizations—the images we hold of what an organization is determines what is and isn't possible for how the organization behaves. If you look at theories of management from the last century, the metaphor underpinning our concept of an organization is "organization as machine." And the component parts of this machine, the functions, are reified in business schools which in turn reinforce the make up of the organization. Finance, Marketing, Sales, R&D, Legal, Operations, Human Resources, Customer Service. Therein lies your organization, give or take.

The machine metaphor works well for businesses that are comprised largely of routine and predictable tasks. Personally, I have never been part of an organization with routine and predicable tasks. Trying to adhere to a mechanistic metaphor in a chaotic age, well, most of us know how absolutely frustrating, dehumanizing, and pervasive mechanistic structures can be. And while attempts have been made to develop new ways of organizing, most have not yet fully escaped the organization-as-machine metaphor.

While we may not be able to change the metaphoric orientation of the organizations we work for, awareness of mechanistic underpinnings can help leaders navigate their roles. The most critical move is to acknowledge and accept that your work is carried out within a mechanistic structure. A structure that seems almost designed to prevent people from fully exercising their autonomy and care for the populations the organization serves. Daniel Schmachtenberger calls corporations "obligate sociopaths" which is incredibly provocative and also an entirely different topic. Suffice it to say, if you're looking for another metaphor to understand your place of employment, this might be a viable option.

Now, this might sound bad! But while are constrained to some degree by these mechanistic structures, we're not powerless within them. This is where the wisdom of decolonial scholars like Papa Mignolo comes in. As he says, "you cannot decolonize the institution, but you can do decolonial work inside of it." He was talking about the academic world, but it applies to most organizations. Just as decolonial thinkers work within institutional constraints while imagining and creating alternative ways of knowing and being, leaders can work within mechanistic structures while fostering more human-centered practices.

One of the most fertile areas to bring our discernment to is the domain of leadership. What metaphor describes the kind of leader you are? What does this metaphor make possible, and what does it hide? What metaphor do you think others might use to describe your leadership? If you want to know how you are doing as a leader, ask the people you work with what animal or storybook character best describes you. The answers will be far more illuminating than any 360 report. And this isn't just a clever leadership hack—it works because metaphorical thinking is fundamental to how we make sense of our world.

Metaphors are everywhere. In the book Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson define metaphor as "understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another." For Gemma Fiumara, metaphor links embodied schemata with cognitive processes, illuminating the biological origins of concepts like balance, scale, force, and cycles. Metaphor lives not only in language, but also in (and through) the body. Metaphors are pervasive.

As a leader, paying attention to metaphors—in imagery, gesture, and sound—is a great way to gain insight into how folks on your team (or anyone in the organization, really) are relating to a situation, opportunity, or challenge. For example, I worked at an organization where senior leadership always wanted to know "whose throat to choke" on any given project or initiative. Yet they couldn't seem to make the connection between the metaphor of accountability-as-violence and the undercurrent of blame pervading the organization's culture. Or a presentation that was given by a new hire: one of the first slides showed a photo of a wintery mountain tundra, with a man out front scanning the horizon. Behind him several people strained against the ropes of supply-laden sleds, pulling them up a steep incline. This image was used to show metaphorically how he saw his role (out front) and where he saw everyone else (pulling heavy weight behind him). And yet, this person was surprised that once promising collaborations suddenly turned cold.

Metaphors matter. They largely exist beyond our conscious awareness, which is what makes them such a powerful structure for leaders to work with. Metaphors are a rich source of information about how folks on your team, in your department, and in the organization itself think about the challenges and opportunities in front of them. Metaphors can be used to unblock individuals and teams when they are stuck. I once worked with a team who felt, metaphorically, that they were the night maids—they felt their role was to clean up after everyone and they largely felt invisible. They hadn't decided this before hand, it's just something that evolved over the course of many years. What they wanted, instead, was to be quilters. To weave together disparate parts of the organization and to create a beautiful offering that made things better for everyone involved. A little more comfortable, a little more fun, a little more connected, a little more visible.

As leaders, we often encounter deeply embedded metaphors that shape not just our organizations, but our entire way of thinking about interaction and conflict. Sometimes these metaphors are so entrenched in how an entire culture views the world, so woven into the material of reality, that we forget they are metaphors to begin with. Take, for example, how we think about disagreement in organizations. Lakoff and Johnson spend an extensive amount of time with the culturally pervasive metaphor "argument as war". Not just the language we use to talk about arguments (e.g. "He attacked every weak point in my argument"), but the very belief that arguments can be won and lost is tied up in metaphor.

As an alternative, they invite us consider a culture where argument is viewed as a dance, where the "participants are seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way." This reframing from combat to collaborative performance isn't just theoretical— it has profound implications for how we lead. When leaders shift from seeing workplace disagreements as battles to be won to seeing them as opportunities for collective meaning-making, it transforms both the process and outcomes of difficult conversations.

I like to think of arguments as a process of dramatic and participatory storytelling, where people energetically and enthusiastically share their perspective. Each perspective contributes to enlarging the sense of what is happening, to creating a bigger and clearer picture of the whole. When the energy present in the system has been fully released, a shift happens and participants gain access to more spaciousness, at which point they can look at what emerged in the collaborative image-making process with more clarity and presence.

When we begin to examine the ways metaphors construct our daily experiences and interactions at work, new worlds of understanding open up. We can listen to the metaphors used by the people we work with and gain insight into their direct experience. How does the person you are talking with describe the challenges or opportunities in front of them? How do they think about their colleagues? How do they see organizational dynamics? The organization itself? And what do those metaphors both reveal and conceal?

As you bring your awareness to the metaphors being used by those in your care, think about what other metaphors might open up new ways of seeing. One way to do this is through open and honest questions. For example, "If this challenge were a chapter in a book, what would its title be?" You can also bring metaphor into the conversation, prompting the person or team you are working with to come up with a metaphor to describe the situation (or themselves), and a new metaphor for how they'd like the situation (or themselves) to be.

As leaders in an increasingly complex world, our relationship with metaphor is both a mirror and a compass. It reflects our current understanding while pointing the way toward new possibilities. By becoming more conscious of the metaphors that shape our organizational lives—whether they're machines, dances, or quilts—we gain access to a powerful tool for transformation. The metaphors we choose don't just describe our reality; they actively shape it. What new worlds might you create by changing the metaphors you lead by?