The power of metaphor

“We provide a scaffold to help people to climb, not to pull on the rope to drag them up ourselves.” My mentor Kaveh Mir provided this analogy during my coach training, and I’ll often refer to that image when faced with the temptation to offer unsolicited advice during a session. Metaphors and analogies delight my analytical brain. I listen out for hints for an image that will support my clients’ thinking. Someone who felt a little ‘lost’ as he rediscovered his career path found great value in exploring his metaphor of a small boat in a vast ocean, fully intact but blown off-course by a storm, navigating back to a chosen route. Another client, describing how she ‘lashed out’ at colleagues, saw herself as a tiger in a cage. We explored the energy and power of tigers, and the frustration they would feel in cages. As she considered options for her future, she began to test whether any choice felt like a cage, or like freedom.

Metaphors are powerful enough to influence social and political thinking. Lichens were the first example of a symbiotic relationship to be discovered. Separate organisms, fungi, algae and bacteria, form a partnership to build a new form of life, one where all benefit and none suffer. Before this, biology had been understood only in the terms of the survival of the fittest, with competition and parasitism the dominant concepts. Symbiosis enabled the metaphor of a ‘win-win’ scenario, the possibility of collaboration where all benefit.

Organisations can explore metaphors as they develop their strategy. I am impressed by how CUSP, the Community for Understanding Scaling Process, rejects the dominant view of scaling up as hierarchical and focused on quantity. Taking a feminist position, they consider a biological ecosystem as an alternative: “with the ecosystem metaphor for scale, one is not importing the seed from outside but rather observing where ‘local’ seeds best suited to the habitat and causing the least disruption to other flora and fauna already exist.” (Rebecca Lundgren, 2022).

I’ve realized that my development as a coach involves an element of ‘unlearning’ and reconstructing habitual thinking styles and skills. It reminds me of the process where a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. In the chrysalis, all the constituent parts of the caterpillar are broken down and reconstructed; while nothing is added or taken away, and the butterfly may bear some resemblance to the original caterpillar, it plays a completely different role in the environment.