Metaphors: a powerful way to communicate

If your parents were any similar to mine, as you were growing up, it's quite likely that they often conveyed lessons through some sort of figurative speech. Or in a more technical definition: metaphors. In fact, I learned one at young age that gave a sense that my first sentence was likely to resonate with you (in a literal translation from my native language, Portuguese):

Parents are all equal, they just change address.

Obviously, metaphors are often generalizations, and next on you learn to understand the nuances, and you don't take them literally nor at its own face, but still they are an effective way to communicate something that may matter.

Fast forward in my life, a bit more than seven years ago, I took up what was my biggest professional challenge up to then, by taking up a leadership role with a globally distributed team. One of the things I eventually figured out was that I had to find a way to use asynchronous opportunities to communicate and share my thinking, so that the team would get a sense of where I was coming from… I started regularly sharing what I called "insight pills" – they were relatively short texts, shared on a weekly basis, every Friday morning, where I shared something that mattered to me, or that I found insightful, that  I thought was useful to anyone else to think about.

Quite often I used metaphors for that. Here's one that I've in fact reused recently:

I rather have every now and then to pull back a locomotive than having to pull forward a wagon.

The idea of this metaphor is to encourage action taking, a bias for action – it's also one of my own personal characteristics. That I would like the team to be in the driving seat of the things they can drive by themselves and that I would prefer to have a conversation about the need to slow something down if needed in some context, then having one about the lack of action.

Again, there's nuance and this is a generalization. And it's OK that some people naturally follow while others are more in the front. Just like a wagon is needed for a train, it is actually the very thing that carries what matters.

The other day I was talking to a friend, someone that was for some time my boss, then my peer (in that very same capacity of the story above), so for quite some time I would say a mentor of mine. I was sharing some current challenges at work, and he asked me a insightful question using a metaphor:

Do you prefer to be the tail of a whale or the head of a rat?

Now, this is not necessarily to say that people just fall in either one or the other category. People may switch preferences in context. But there's something about natural tendencies that shouldn't be underestimated.

The point of the metaphor is really about asking yourself if it is OK for you if you mostly need to follow what is going on in a much bigger context, perhaps just able to here and there make a rather constrained difference. Or do you prefer to be more in charge of where things are headed, even if that may mean in a smaller context, but able to drive bigger changes.

What about you? What are the metaphors that recently resonated with you? Have you thought about how much you have learned out of these useful means of communication?

And by the way, sometimes metaphors might even be a way to express the underlying culture of a people. For instance, I am Brazilian, we speak Portuguese, and which means a people with a tendency for high-context communication style. We imply more than we literally say. We believe that context is more than the literal words that get out of someone's mouth. And we have a saying that everyone over there knows which helps to communicate out that culture:

For a good "understander", half a word is enough…

It doesn't translate that well, but I think you get the spirit of implication versus directly saying everything you want to convey.

by Rodrigo Sperb, feel free to connect (I only refuse invites from people clearly with an agenda to ‘coldly’ sell something to me), happy to engage and interact