Business, scientific, and technical writers tend to dismiss metaphorical language as creative writing and fluff. That dismissal is unfortunate, and hypocritical! Think of the world without the Internet when when used "worm" and "bug" in reference to critters, when we used "virus" and "viral" in reference to medical conditions.
Dr. Marlene Carosselli studied language use in The Language of Leadership (1990, pp. 78-79). She discovered that leaders in industry, corporations, politics, religion--all formulate comparisons between what people already know and what the leader wants them to understand. Common associations through similes, metaphors, and analogies create the comfort required for people to accept new possibilities, risks, and visions. To anchor a new (or what is new to the receiver) concept to an old (or what is familiar to the receiver) image is a technique that is underused in our fast-paced technological society. Things are changing and evolving with each day. It is easy to fear all the change.
More writers could benefit from the mindset of the leaders she studied. It is especially useful for scientists and engineers to know how to explain concepts from their industries in comfortable, familiar language for the business decision-makers, stakeholders, and consumers.
I listened to a National Geographic documentary last week on television. Deep sea explorations require divers to understand the "bends." For a layperson, this is the condition of gases building up in the blood during a too-rapid acsent, like a shaken liter of soda that swells, boils, and erupts when its cap is removed too quickly. The image of the carbonation exploding out of the bottle is similar to what happens to a diver's blood when the diver moves too fast from a high-pressured depth to the surface of the water. The blood and the body need a slow adjustment of pressure and that requires a slow ascention.
In the introduction to Neurobiology, Gordon M. Shepherd, M.D., Ph.D.,of Yale University writes, "One of the ways in which principles are useful is that they force us to define the elementary units, the basic building blocks, of a field of knowledge" (p. 4). He continues to say that neurobiology gives us the "tools" to "weld [those principles] into a coherent framework" (p. 8, 3rd ed.) to help us understand what it means to be human.
Biology is not the only field that can use metaphors effectively. In sociology, economics, and civics, Martin Luther King, Jr., was able to associate civil rights with a bank account. In his famous "I Have a Dream" speech on August 28,1963, at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, MLK said: "...In a sense we've come to our nation's capitol to cash a check.When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.... Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.' But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation...."
Metaphors help us understand faster and remember longer. Try them in your leadership communications. As fast as technology changes (and society in response to it), we need the comfort of familiar associations for the unknown to become less fearsome and for us to become less fearful of what we do not know, understand, or imagine. We will be more likely to hire, buy, and consume when our fear is eliminated and our comfort is reinforced.
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