As humans, we tend to make sense of things by comparing them with other things that we already know. We make most of our decisions in a novel situation by matching new patterns with older patterns that we have already experienced, so we often end up making analogies to make sense.
However, as we know from working in the Dreamwork Space, any analogy is only as good as the context it is being used in. For example, the comedian Frankie Boyle uses Sarah Palin’s pit bull analogy to show what can happen when we take an analogy too far.
‘I’m like a pitbull, I’m tenacious.’ Yeah, that’s good.
‘I’m like a pitbull, if you leave me in the room with a child I’ll kill them’. Not so good.
‘I’m like a pitbull, if I take a really strong hold of your arm, the only way to get me to release my grip is to stick a finger up my a*se!’ A metaphor too far.
And believe me, Frankie Boyle is one person who knows about taking things too far! The lesson is, keep the analogy short, but so often in management, we take an analogy and allow it to become reality. So we end up thinking of organisations as machines with predictable and controllable behaviours. Or our brains as computers that just store data and regularly need to be rebooted and upgraded. Or relationships that are like binary ones and zeroes, either existing or not existing, instead of displaying the whole range of human interaction between two human beings.
As Dave Briggs, played by Robert Powell, remarks in the wonderful Detectives, ‘You can lead a horse to water, but teach it to fish and it will neither a borrower or a lender be’.