Seeing through metaphors
If you can’t see clearly where to focus, you can’t take pragmatic, high leverage action
“Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed.” — Albert Einstein 1
Back in 2019 I published a 22-page report on the Five Fatal Habits that have consistently stifled, smothered, and strangled the emergence of future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness for more than three decades. 2
Those five habits are :
“One Best Way” Thinking — a legacy stemming from the Scientific Management principles of the early 20th century.
“All or Nothing” Thinking — a legacy of the Strategic Planning era of the 1960’s to 1990’s.
Leadership that Creates Followers — a legacy of traditional and now woefully out of date notions of leadership.
Wasting People’s Strengths — a legacy of traditional HR practices rooted in Habits 1, 2 & 3.
Hired Help that Hinders — a legacy stemming from more than a century of organisations being “helped” by big consulting firms whose businesses are built on the traditional finders, minders, grinders operating model.
These legacy organisational habits are underpinned by four dominant metaphors that bias, colour and constrain how we see, think about and run organisations.
The metaphors are revealed by the organisational terminology we use:
Organisations as armies — with their strategies, reporting lines, commanders, recruits, headquarters, front-line, tactics, etc;
Organisations as politics — where there are issues of power, control, interests, conflicts, policies, political correctness, etc;
Organisations as machines — a dominant metaphor for most of the past century implying that organisations need to be designed, structured, measured, governed, re-engineered, and where, when things aren’t working, you remove parts and replace them with other parts — including people who are seen as replaceable cogs, etc;
Organisations as teams — with playbooks, coaches, managers, game plans, team positions, teamwork, team spirit, etc.
Mixing organisational metaphors
We mix and switch between these metaphors with little conscious thought as to how deeply they affect what and how we see in our organisations.
As a result, we commonly overlook how powerfully and unconsciously metaphors frame, shape, colour, and limit the available options we perceive for moving forward.
So, when something crops up, we think: “OK, how do we fight back? What’s our plan of campaign? How do we capture the high ground? What tactics can we deploy? We may need to bring in the big guns for this one.” And lo and behold — we’re strategists commanding our armies…
Or we think: “Hang on — what games are they up to? Who’s dictating the agenda? Who’s trying to expand their influence? Where do we need new policies?” — And there we have the language of politics…
We think: “How do we reorganise? How should we restructure? How do we improve governance? How to boost productivity? How to fix our business processes? What will increase efficiency?” — The language of machines…
Or we think: “We need to field our best team here. Who do we need in which positions? How do we keep score? How might we level or tilt the playing field? How might our opponents try to get past our defences? — (A mix of teams and armies in that last one!).
These metaphors are deeply ingrained in the organisational discourse, and we move flexibly and fluidly between them.
Despite what we may have been taught in school, there’s nothing inherently wrong with “mixing our metaphors” in this way.
As a former engineer, I know that my fellow engineers, scientists and technologists readily switch between theories — literally ‘ways of seeing things’ — to suit the different demands of changing contexts and circumstances. 3
When we see through our metaphors they act like lenses, framing, shaping, colouring, and limiting what we see.
But as Einstein pointed out at Heisenberg’s 1926 Berlin lecture, quoted above, that can be problematic because of what they prevent us from seeing.
The problem with seeing organisations though these four dominant legacy metaphors is that none of these ways of seeing helps you see how to transform the culture.
However, by paying deeper attention, we become able to see through the metaphors we’ve been using — beyond their biases and boundaries.
This is crucially important if we’re to see clearly where to focus to take pragmatic, high leverage action.
If we’re unable to do that, we won’t achieve much by simply thrashing around fighting the system.
Seeing culture as “system of mindsets”
A systemic perspective is vital for cutting through organisational complexity so you can take focused, pragmatic, high leverage action.
The key here is to understand how a particular culture actually gets established and embedded in an organisational community. 4
The reason so many culture change efforts fail is that they don’t reflect how cultures actually affect people’s mindsets, and so they’re not just ineffective but backfire. 5
The most useful source of insight here comes from reflecting on your own personal, lived experience of when you’ve moved to a different organisational community in which people did things differently.
Remember how disorientating it felt at first?
But after a month or two you’d worked out the lie of the land, found your feet, learned the ropes, and settled in.
The culture — the way we do things round here — had now become part of your mindset.
Notice how the culture got into your mindset through various clues, cues, signs, and signals you picked up from the attitudes and behaviours of others — attitudes and behaviours that originated in their mindsets. 6
That's how the system of mindsets — aka the culture — propagates.
It doesn’t spread through mission, vision, and values statements, presentations, or videos. 7
Every organisation has its own uniquely complex pattern of which people’s mindsets affect which people’s mindsets in which ways.
What makes the culture of a given organisational community unique is the specific system of mindsets that forms and informs people’s awareness of ‘the way we do things round here’.
Despite their uniqueness, every future-fit culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness features a very specific mindset at its core — one that says:
“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.
However, the prevailing mindset in organisations with low levels of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness approaches these inevitable differences of perspective with much more antagonism:
“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 even fired because you’re getting in my way.
2D perspectives on 3D reality
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 — which is 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.
When Einstein came up with relativity theory, he didn’t see the whole of reality. He just came at physics from a different angle, with a different way of seeing, a different theory, that allowed him to see what no-one else had seen before.
Curiosity and respect for different 2D perspectives on an inherently unknowable 3D reality is at the heart of a future-fit culture of innovation and agility because, despite the Hollywood image of the lone genius, breakthrough innovations invariably arise from multiple people combining their different respective 2D perspectives.
That’s how innovation works.
And 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. 8
In other words, innovative, agile, adaptive organisations are built on a foundation of 2D3D mindsets — the deeper and more widespread the better. 9
Fortunately, people develop 2D3D mindsets naturally and automatically as soon as the penny drops that none of us ever sees the whole of anything.
Thereafter, when someone sees something you don’t, it’s obvious to you they’re seeing things that you’re missing.
Then your attitude changes.
You stop seeing others as mistaken, misinformed or misguided.
And you start seeing them as colleagues who can not only help you enrich your own understanding, but that together you can create value the world hasn’t seen before.
So, how do you cultivate 2D3D mindsets throughout an organisational community?
Isn’t changing people’s mindsets a difficult if not impossible task?
It certainly can be — if you forget to stay connected with your own lived experience of how culture actually propagates. Then you’ll be left with ineffective approaches that fail to reflect, or leverage, what actually shifts mindsets in human communities.
But by learning to see culture as the prevailing system of mindsets you see culture change as 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 vastly greater results.
For more details on how to do that, see this previous post: Leverage for systemic change.
Einstein at Heisenberg's 1926 lecture at Berlin; related by Heisenberg, quoted in Unification of Fundamental Forces (1990) by Abdus Salam
This previous post summarised the Five Fatal Habits and includes a download link to the original 22-page report.
Theory (n): conception, mental scheme, way of seeing. From Greek theōrein "to consider, speculate, look at"; theōros "spectator, observer"; thea "a view".
For more detail see this previous post on The secret everyone already knows.
One of the worst mistakes you can make is to get hoodwinked into accepting the toxic myth that an organisation’s culture is its shared values.
To understand how people pick up the clues, clues, signs, and signals through which they infer the culture, see this previous post.
A focus on mission, vision, and values is one of four traditional ways of attempting organisational change that don’t work for creating future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness.
See this two minute video on the importance of cultivating diversity whilst avoiding fragmentation.
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.