Sherpa Alliance

“If a picture is worth a thousand words, a metaphor is worth a thousand pictures”, says Daniel Pink in his book, “A Whole New Mind – moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age”.  He goes on to say:

“In a complex world, mastery of metaphor has become ever more valuable.  Human thought processes are largely metaphorical.  Metaphor making is critical - metaphorical imagination is essential in forging empathetic connections and communicating experiences that others do not share.  A large part of self-understanding is the search for appropriate personal metaphors that make sense of our lives.  The more we understand metaphor, the more we understand ourselves”.

“A metaphor is a compacted version of reality” – that’s one of the best explanations I have heard, coming from a Vistage speaker, Rick Eigenbrod.  It reminds us that the reason we use metaphors is that they are packed with the complexity and richness of something which we are more familiar with, to help us understand something we are unfamiliar with.  When we experiment with unpacking the metaphor, it allows us to transfer understanding from the familiar to the unfamiliar.

Metaphors allow us to convey complex concepts with elegant simplicity (Simplicity & Complexity).  That’s why we make use of metaphors in our work and the master metaphor of being “In the Driving Seat” of organizational agility.

The dictionary definition of a metaphor is:

"A figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance;  something used, or regarded as being used, to represent something else; emblem; symbol."

Now, if you really want to get into it, there are specific differences between a metaphor, a simile, an analogy and maybe other associated definitions, but for our purposes we are going to lump all those into the category of “metaphors”.

Think about how you can make more use of metaphor in your business to help you team master the complexities of your business with elegant simplicity.