Hi guys and welcome back to brain-friendly thinking!
Whether we say inflation, frame of mind or opinion leader, metaphors are literally everywhere.
They help us to communicate clearly and to solve challenging problems.
What makes good metaphors so powerful?
And what can you do to create good metaphors yourself?
Metaphor means to carry over.
Specifically to carry over a characteristic or explanation from a thing we understand
very well to a thing we want to explain.
When we’re talking about inflation for instance, we’re really using a metaphor.
We’re taking the familiar sight of a balloon inflating and applying it to describe the
rise of prices of pretty much everything.
But then, when I say “prices are rising” or “prices are exploding”, I’m just
exchanging one metaphor for another one.
Do you see how difficult it is to even talk about price development without using metaphors?
That is no coincidence.
The more abstract something is, the more we need metaphors to make sense of what we’re
experiencing.
And we humans are really good at this.
This is why metaphors are literally everywhere.
When we think, we follow trains of thought.
The aim of a team building exercise is to forge a strong bond between team members.
And a misleading thumbnail or title is called a click-bait.
Metaphors help us to make sense of the world around us.
And that is why great explainers and great communicators are usually also great creators
of metaphors.
But why are metaphors so useful?
It’s because good metaphors show us a fundamental similarity between two things.
And that means I can take my knowledge of one thing to predict some of the behaviour
of another thing.
A great example of that are electric and hydraulic circuits.
In a hydraulic circuit you have a pump that drives oil through pipes in order to operate
machines such as a cylinder.
In electric circuits you have batteries or generators that drive electrons through cables
in order to operate machines such as electric motors.
Now sometimes it happens that you get small irregularities in the flow of the electrons
that show up as voltage ripples.
And that can either damage or degrade the output of your electric machine.
Interestingly, this is another similarity between the two types of circuits.
In hydraulic circuits you can also have irregularities in the oil flow.
But you can dampen them when you integrate accumulators into your circuits.
Flow irregularities are oscillations where you sometimes have too much fluid flow and
sometimes you have not enough.
And an accumulator is essentially a storage device that can store excess flow during the
peaks and release them again when you need more flow during the troughs.
Now, if know this we can ask the question: is there a similar device that can store and
release electric energy quickly?
And it turns out there is.
It’s called a capacitor.
So, just as for hydraulic circuits, one way you can dampen voltage ripples is by integrating
capacitors into your system.
In other words, by seeing fundamental similarities, we could take our knowledge of the hydraulic
circuit to solve a problem in the electric circuit we would not have otherwise been able
to solve.
And that’s the power of metaphors.
Of course, while there are many similarities between hydraulic and electric circuits, there’re
also many differences.
For example, while accumulators and capacitors can function in similar roles in both systems,
the mechanism by which they operate is fundamentally different.
So, we always must be careful that we don’t extend metaphors too far.
And we must be careful that the similarity we’re seeing really is a fundamental and
not just a superficial similarity.
Otherwise metaphors can lead us to wrong predictions and wrong decisions.
Right.
So, this is why metaphors are so useful.
But how do you go about creating good metaphors yourself?
The good thing is that you’re probably already creating metaphors on a fairly regular basis
even if you’re not aware of this.
On the other hand, most of us can also run and yet most of us are not athletes.
Just like with anything else in life, to get really good at creating metaphors we need
practice and experience.
Fortunately, Vera F. Birkenbihl, a great explainer and communicator herself, developed a five
step process that increases the chance of producing good metaphors and that can be learned.
The idea behind this process is that you take a topic you’re very familiar with and you
use it to methodically generate and evaluate similarities to a topic you want to explain.
Step 1: Choose a topic for which you want to create metaphors.
This can be very general or it can be very specific.
It can be a certain mechanism you want to explain better or it can be something much
more abstract.
Step 2: Prepare a list of words from a topic you know very well, but that is very far removed
from the topic for which you want to create metaphors.
This can be from your everyday life, from your focus topic or from a hobby or sport.
They can be concrete objects or they can be more abstract concepts.
This is an optional step.
You can instead use a random word generator.
However, it seems the likelihood that you find good metaphors is higher if you use these
lists.
Step 3: Generate associations and check them for similarities to your topic.
This is the crucial step.
Take a word from your list or a word provided by a random word generator and see what associations
do you come up with.
You can do this on paper, by speaking or simply in your mind.
Sometimes, as soon as you have the associations, you immediately see the connection to your
topic.
If that happens, that’s great.
However, if you’re not so lucky then do it in two separate steps.
First come up with the associations and then go through them one by one and see “are
there any similarities with my topic?”
If there are, write them down.
These are your metaphors.
It can be that none of your associations has any particular connection to your topic.
That’s perfectly fine.
Not every word will yield a metaphor.
However, if you go through a whole list, the chances are good that you at least get a handful
of metaphors.
Let’s say my topic is “thinking tools”.
Let’s say I choose “objects in my room” for this list.
Let’s take the word bed.
What comes to my mind when I hear the word bed?
Well, I think about sleep, the night…
A bed is made of several components such as the frame, the mattress, the duvet, the pillow.
It supports the body while you’re lying down.
One connection that I can see is that just like a bed uses several components to give
you a good night’s sleep, so too there are thinking tools, and especially traditional
creativity techniques, that combine several more basic thinking tools in order to achieve
a specific purpose.
Here is an interesting one: scissors.
Scissors are used to cut things into smaller pieces.
And there are certainly thinking tools that help us to dissect or break concepts or ideas
into their components, such as various forms of categorisation or flow charts.
But when I think about scissors, I also think about glue, even though it’s not on my list.
Glue helps you to stick individual components together and to form a new whole.
And there are thinking tools that help you to make new connections you didn’t make
before.
Such as this process for creating metaphors.
If you’re not use to consciously recognise metaphors this step might be a little bit
difficult at the beginning.
It might be especially helpful if you have a group of people with who you can practice
together.
If you don’t know anybody you can practice with, you might be interested that I offer
personal coaching and I’m also in the process of developing some cohort courses.
Links are in the description.
Step 4: Rank your metaphors.
After you collected a good chunk of metaphors, it’s now time to go through them and rank
them.
I said before that good metaphors show us fundamental similarities between things whereas
bad metaphors only show us superficial similarities.
But this is not necessarily an all or nothing.
A metaphor can be more or less fundamental.
Now go through your list and rank your metaphors according to how well they can capture the
essence of the topic you want to explain.
This gives you the opportunity to weed out unsuitable metaphors or to transform them
to make them better.
Step 5: Continue to work with your metaphors.
Now that you found some suitable metaphors, you can continue to work with them to understand
them better.
This is again an optional step.
Whether you do it or not depends on what you want to use your metaphors for.
If you want to use your metaphors to communicate or teach someone, maybe you want to group
them according to which type of audience they’re most suitable for.
Or you can rank them to see “how much does somebody need to know about the topic to appreciate
the point the metaphor is trying to explain?”
If you created the metaphors for yourself, you can group them according to which aspect
of the topic they help you to explain.
And in any case it can be very fruitful to explore your idea more by drawing CaGas, little
sketches that try to express the essence of an idea.
These are the five steps.
If you practice them, you’ll soon be able to create great metaphors yourself.
Metaphors are great to communicate clearly and to solve challenging problems.
If you need further help to put your ideas into words, you can watch the video right
here.
Or if you want other thinking tools to help you solve your problems, you can watch the
playlist right here.
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And until next time: keep thinking!