A couple of years ago I spoke at a BHP Billiton planning day. My talk was at the end of the day so I sat up the back and listened to all the other speakers. While listening I was struck by the language the BHP Billiton people used: “we need to turbo charge the process, turn the cogs, grease the wheels, dig deeper …” The dominant metaphor was that of a machine. I mentioned this to them in my talk and made the point that organisations can become trapped by the metaphors they use. If you view your organisation and its issues as a machine you will only devise machine-based responses.

After this experience I kept a keen ear out for dominant metaphors in other companies and discovered a bunch of examples: an investment bank where gambling was the major metaphor: let’s roll the dice, we came up trumps, what are the odds …; a road traffic authority that, you guessed it, uses road metaphors: we’ve got a green light, this is just one way traffic, we have a clear road map …

Are you aware of the dominant metaphor in play at your organisation?

To help you get started identifying metaphors, Gabe Mounce has written an article called Metaphors are Mindfunnels with a couple of colleagues in the US Airforce. It reviews George Lakoff’s Metaphors We Live By and is a good introduction to the issues. You can find a link to the article at Gabe’s blog post.