Mind your metaphors
Avoiding outdated legacy metaphors that undermine creation of future-fit cultures
“By far the greatest thing is the use of metaphor. That alone cannot be learnt; it is the token of genius. For the right use of metaphor means an eye for resemblances.” — Aristotle 1
There are four dominant metaphors that bias, colour, and constrain how people tend to see, think, and act in organisational contexts.
If you pay close attention to the language someone uses, you can identify the underlying metaphors they’re employing — even if they’re unaware of doing so.
The following four metaphors tend to underpin the majority of organisational discourse: 2
Organisations as armies — revealed in language such as strategies, reporting lines, command and control, recruitment, headquarters, front line staff, tactics, logistics, etc;
Organisations as politics — with notions of power, control, interests, conflicts, policies, political correctness, etc;
Organisations as machines — a hugely dominant metaphor for more than a century, leading to often unquestioned axioms such as organisations must be designed, structured, measured, governed, re-engineered, consist of replaceable parts (e.g. humans treated as cogs), and process resources (including humans, hence “HR”) etc;
Organisations as teams — with playbooks, coaches, managers, game plans, positions, teamwork, team spirit, etc.
Metaphors operate as lenses, framing, shaping, colouring and biasing what we see.
But they also act as blinkers, preventing us from seeing what they don’t admit — as Albert Einstein pointed out:
“Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory you use. It is the theory that decides what can be observed.” 3
The problem with theories of organisation based on these four dominant legacy metaphors is that none of them helps you see clearly where to focus to transform organisational culture.
If you try to create a future-fit culture without clarity of focus, you inevitably end up thrashing around, eventually deciding it’s just too difficult, and ultimately giving up.
The secret to gaining clarity of focus is to adopt the metaphor of organisation as human community in which culture is the system of mindsets forming and informing people’s awareness of the way we do things round here.
Community culture as system of mindsets
Why system of mindsets, what does that mean in practice, and how does it enable clarity of focus?
Cast your mind back to a time when you joined a new organisational community that did things differently to what you’d been used to up to that point.
Remember how disorientating it felt at first?
But, after a while, you’d worked out the lie of the land, found your feet, and learned the ropes.
The culture in the new community — the way they do things round here — had gradually become part of your mindset, and as you settled in, “they” ultimately became “we”. 4
This process of socialisation into a new cultural context typically takes about three months.
Notice how you grasped “the way we do things round here” through various clues, cues, signs, and signals conveyed via the attitudes, and behaviours of others — attitudes and behaviours that originated in their mindsets. 5
This is how organisational cultures form — influential people, not always in the most senior positions, behave in ways that originate in their mindsets.
In turn, these behaviours influence the perceptions of “the way we do things round here” in the mindsets of others.
So, the mindsets of the key influencers systemically affects the mindsets of others — hence “culture as system of mindsets”. 6
Shift the mindsets of influential people, and they begin acting and interacting in new ways that, in turn, influence the mindsets, attitudes, and behaviours of others.
In other words, organisational cultures not only form based on the mindsets of key influencers, they can be reformed by changing the mindsets of the key influencers.
Every organisational community exhibits its own unique pattern of key influencers whose mindsets most affect other people’s mindsets, and in what ways.
That’s why every organisational culture is different— because a unique system of mindsets forms and informs people’s awareness of the way we do things round here.
Despite this uniqueness, every future-fit culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness features widespread adoption of a specific mindset that promotes the following attitude:
“You know what, you see things differently from me. Help me to understand more about how you see things because what I learn from you will enrich my own understanding”.
People with this mindset approach each other with genuine curiosity and respect for each other’s different take on things.
By contrast, in organisational cultures lacking in innovation, agility, and adaptiveness, the prevailing mindset promotes antagonistic attitudes towards differences of perspective and those who express them:
“You know what, you see things differently from me. We can’t both be right — and I know I am — so you must be wrong”.
If I have this outlook, I’ll set about trying to show you that you’re wrong.
And if I can’t convince you that you’re wrong, I’ll avoid you.
And if I can’t avoid you, I’ll try and get you moved, sidelined or fired because you’re getting in my way.
The key insight that most effectively and consistently overcomes the latter dysfunctional mindset and unlocks the former innovative mindset is this: none of us ever sees the whole picture.
That’s why none of us is as smart as all of us.
No one, no matter how brilliant, ever sees the whole picture of anything. Each of us only ever has a biased, partial and limited “2D” take on a “3D” reality that none of us can ever hope to see in its entirety.
Curiosity and respect for the different 2D perspectives of others is fundamental to future-fit cultures of innovation and agility.
That’s because, despite the Hollywood image of the lone genius in a white lab coat pulling all-nighters until they eventually emerge shouting “eureka”, innovations that create new value in new ways inevitably stem from multiple people combining their different respective 2D perspectives.
I saw this time and time again in the twelve years I spent working at one of the world’s leading open innovation labs.7
So that why it’s vital to enable, encourage and empower diverse people to explore, share and combine their individual, biased, partial, and incomplete 2D perspectives.
In other words, innovative, agile, adaptive organisations are built on a foundation of 2D3D mindsets — the deeper and wider the better. 8
Fortunately, we develop a 2D3D mindset naturally when we realise that none of us ever sees the whole of anything.
When this penny drops, if someone sees something you don’t, it’s obvious to you they’re seeing things that you’re missing — and your attitude changes.
You stop seeing them as clearly mistaken, misinformed, or misguided.
You start seeing them as colleagues who can not only help you enrich your own understanding, but that together you can create new value in the world.
So, how do you cultivate 2D3D mindsets throughout an organisational community?
Isn’t changing people’s mindsets extremely difficult?
It certainly can be, if you forget to stay connected with your own lived experience of how culture actually propagates. Lose this connection to lived reality and you’ll be drawn into ineffective, overly cerebral pontifications that fail to recognise and leverage what actually shifts mindsets in human communities.
But by learning to see culture as the prevailing system of mindsets you recognise that culture change is systems change.
Then, as with all systemic change, the trick is to find and focus on the key leverage points where relatively little effort yields much greater results. 9
And, as we’ve seen, the place to focus for maximum leverage is on getting the key influencers to shift from 2D to 2D3D mindsets. 10
Questions for reflection
Which legacy metaphors are most prevalent in your organisation?
Are organisational efforts towards creating a future-fit culture stymied by one or more of these inappropriate underlying metaphors?
Are you actively cultivating 2D3D mindsets in yourself and others — and if not, why not?
In Aristotle’s Poetics ca 335 BCE (Greek: Περὶ ποιητικῆς Peri poietikês; Latin: De Poetica; ) —the earliest surviving work of Greek dramatic/literary theory. The quote on metaphors is from section 1459a.
There are other less prevalent metaphors too. A good read on the topic is Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organisation (1986).
Einstein at Heisenberg's 1926 lecture at Berlin, related by Heisenberg, quoted in Unification of Fundamental Forces (1990) by Abdus Salam
For a deeper understanding of mindsets, drawing on recent developments in cognitive science, see this previous article.
To understand how people pick up the clues, clues, signs, and signals through which they infer the culture, see this previous post.
For more on this topic, see the previous article Focus on key influencers.
I saw this early in my career when I worked at one of the world’s leading open innovation labs from 1983-1995.
For more on the 2D3D mindset at the heart of future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness, see this previous post and the six minute video linked therein.
For more details on how to do that, see this previous post Leverage for systemic change.
Ibid — Focus on key influencers.