Storming Medieval Institutions

The world is flipping on its axes. ‘Rigorous top-down’ management systems that dominated the 20th century — treating workers first as cogs in a machine and later as chips in a super-computer — have started creaking in the 21st century. Technology, platforms, disruption, disengagement and disloyal customers set against a backdrop of dissatisfaction with the politico-economic status quo, are draining the machine of its power.

“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Palaeolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology” — E.O. Wilson

The ‘organisation as machine’ metaphor relegates the most creative force — humans — to being just another asset. In the same way organisations may procure tools on an output/per dollar ratio, or design processes with least waste/quickest throughput considerations they have also hired people for predictability — or ‘organisational fit’. This is in spite of evolutionary theory demonstrating that variation within a system is critical to that system’s resilience, long-term performance and survival.

However, other powerful forces are at play in our organisations today that are also disruptive and discombobulating, resisting even the most rigorous efforts to engineer them out in favour of alignment and predictability: metaphors. The act of “giving a thing a name that belongs to something else” (Aristotle) shifts the perspective people have of things in their environment to an abstract level and enables them to see new things in familiar ways so we can think and act anew. It is this — in an age of unfettered communication globally — that is disrupting your business today.

‘You don’t see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it.’ (R. Shaw)

To survive in a complex world that is rich in uncertainty and novelty we seek insights to guide us through the fog. To thrive we need to rapidly orient ourselves to an ever-changing set of conditions. Succeeding means dealing with an array of threats and exploiting opportunities before rivals can. Metaphor is the way our species has managed this so far.

Metaphor is everywhere. Stock market “investors regally chase hot stocks, trying to invest in them before they go cold”; advertising deodorants emphasises sexual prowess; and political metaphors attempt to frame, nudge (manipulate?) the opinions of the public (‘strong and stable leadership’). But metaphors are not only for writers — we use them incessantly.

In his book⁠ [1] James Greary provides this example from an Australian weather forecast that uses five metaphors in 58 words (one in every 11 words):

‘Perth is in the grip of a heat wave with temperatures set to soar to 40 degrees Celsius by the end of the week. Australia is no stranger to extreme weather. Melbourne was pummelled with hailstones the size of golf balls on Saturday. Long term, droughts, bushfires, and floods have all plagued large swathes of Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria.’

In economics, he notes, metaphors are even more prevalent:

‘Risks to U.K. Recovery Lurk Behind Cloudy Outlook: Britain’s recovery from the worst recession in decades is gaining traction but confused economic data and the high risk of a hung parliament could yet snuff out its momentum.’ (Six metaphors in thirty-seven words — one for almost every six words).

Metaphors are powerful as they affect us in ways we don’t see. Analysts use metaphor to give something agency — the stock is ‘on a charge’ — because agency encourages us to act by triggering the sensation that something is pursuing a goal, which taps into our evolutionary hard-wiring (we give things agency as a form of risk-mitigation as it’s far better to wrongly assume the rustling of grass is a predator about to pounce than wrongly assume it’s just the wind). Metaphor shapes how we act, often without us knowing why.

“We think metaphorically. Metaphorical thinking is the way we make sense of the world, and every individual metaphor is a specific instance of this imaginative process at work.” James Greary

New ideas are often first described by the pre-existing thing it most closely resembles: cars were mechanical carriages; trains were land-based ships; and seemingly every hi-tech start pitches itself as the “the Uber of X” or aims to be the “Amazon of Y”. Metaphors help people gain a reference on the unfamiliar — but they can also mislead.

We describe human intelligence in computer terms and human organisations in mechanical terms, not because human intelligence resembles a computer or an organisation a machine, but because we don’t yet understand these things well enough to give them their own names. Our limiting metaphors highlight our continued ignorance of the nature of these critical areas for our societies and civilisation. We must instead ‘learn to listen to our own humanity’⁠ [2] if we want to advance and keep up with our ‘god-like technology’ advances.

Metaphor “is not the mere detection of patterns; it is the creation of patterns too” (J.Greary). They disrupt the commonly accepted understanding of things by purposefully mixing up the “abstract with the concrete, the physical with the psychological, the like with the unlike — and reorganises it into uncommon combinations.” This playful thinking is how we make sense of the complex world around us. Ignoring or rejecting this messiness and variation in favour of alignment and staying on message is the reason so few organisations are able to innovate or ride the wave of change innovation has unleashed.

Organisations don’t lack creative talent but have instead nurtured cultures that favour predictability, with performance systems that reward conformity and architectures designed for outputs but not experimentation. Organisations are guilty of turning culture into cult.

Science and technology leaps forward on the back of metaphors — inventors and scientists compare what they know with what they don’t know and ‘find out about the latter by investigating the ways it might be like the former’. Metaphors therefore help us advance — but they need us as much as we need them: it’s a partnership but we’re failing.

Organisations today must break down the engineering metaphor straight-jacketing them. It will be no easy feat, for once a metaphor takes hold it sweeps everyone up in it’s path and doesn’t let go of them easily: people make it their own, their outlooks shaped and action informed by it. Yet, once leaders realise that they can make their visions more effective by harnessing the power of authentic metaphors that emerge from the soil of the environment (not ‘created’ artificially and tested in focus groups) they’ll discover a cheaper, quicker and more reliable competitive advantage than all the big data, ‘going agile’ or artificial intelligence strategies they’re currently playing with and paying for.

1 I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World. James Geary

2 https://medium.com/@marcusguest/3-mushy-bags-of-irrationality-emotion-2e81de37feab