What is your organization like?

How do you describe an experience to someone who has never had it?  If you are like most people, you will compare the experience to something that the person may be familiar with — you will use a metaphor.  These metaphors act like a map of the territory, pointing out its features and how to navigate it.

This characteristic of metaphors can be useful in problem solving. When our usual train of thought does not lead us to a solution, one often frutiful approach is to ask, “What is this situation like?” Considering analogies often opens us up to new ways of seeing the problem and potential solutions.

Paradoxically, in the same way that the metaphors we use can reveal the territory, by leading us to think along certain lines, they also serve to obscure the territory.  The reason for this is that, in order to distinguish and differentiate aspects of our environment, we must foreground some part of our experience or thoughts and background others. We see what we are looking at. What reveals also conceals.

This insight is useful for us in thinking about leadership and organizations.  Many of the metaphors we use for organizations have been taken from the military, sports, and beginning in the industrial age, even factories!  Nautical analogies show leaders are “at the helm,” running a “tight ship.” Each of these analogies has arisen in an era shaped by certain ideas, and in turn have shaped the way that we have historically approached leadership and organizations.

Are any of these analogies “true”?  To the extent that they are descriptive (or prescriptive), we can say that they are “true”; yet no one of these analogies exhaustively describe organizations or, especially, their potentials — what they can be.  In the next few posts, we’ll explore common metaphors for organizations, their strengths, and their limitations, and talk about some emerging metaphors that are very useful for thinking about how organizations can better respond to our dynamic environment!

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