Levers, blueprints and roadmaps: 3 tips to combat "dark" metaphors

Change, Complexity and adaptive leadership, culture, Metaphor, Metaphorology

For those who follow me, it’s probably become apparent that I have a love for metaphors and analogies. Because much of what I do involves introducing others to new concepts, I find them to be useful “hooks”, linking the new idea to something familiar, thereby providing a “scaffold of mind” while understanding grows. Because of this, […]

Want resilience? Nurture diversity.

Complexity and adaptive leadership, culture, Metaphor, Metaphorology, Resilience

One of the learnings from complexity that I find particularly valuable in the workplace is the need for a “requisite diversity”. Too little diversity limits the system’s adaptive capacity and too much diversity leads to a loss of coherence. One way to look at this is the tension between efficiency and centralisation e.g. instead […]

Walking with the elephants

Change, Complexity and adaptive leadership, culture, Metaphorology

Today I want to share one of my favorite analogies. I use this in almost every presentation as a way to challenge the prevailing paradigm that priveleges expert design and control. There are two ways to lay out a park … ... one is to employ an expert landscape architect to design an ideal layout […]

Think like a Chef

agility, Complexity and adaptive leadership, Metaphorology

The trouble is that, in my view, the continual bombardment of quick and simple recipes is doing nothing to teach us how to cook. We are in serious danger of becoming slaves to recipes, rather than having the confidence to be able to walk along a supermarket aisle, or look through fridge and cupboard, to […]

Metaphorology

Metaphorology, Methods and practices

I have always loved metaphors and analogies. Stumbling upon a really great metaphor always feels like discovering hidden treasure (see what I did there?... :-)) Metaphors are pervasive Research says that we use 6 metaphors a minute (!) - at first this seems impossible, but once we tune into metaphors, it soon becomes apparent just […]

Blog - Category: Metaphorology