A metaphor is a figure of speech that refers to one thing by mentioning another. “The world’s a stage”.

A simile is similar to a metaphor but using the words “like” or “as”. “Life is like a box of chocolates”.

An analogy is also similar but more complex because rather than a figure of speech, it is a logical argument: “Finding my keys is like finding a needle in a haystack”.

These resources can be used to explain a point, to simplify understanding. They use previous knowledge from the recipient, a listener or a reader, to describe an object or an action in a way that is not literally true. Metaphors have a stronger effect because they do a direct comparison. We replace one object with the other and we feel clear connections.

When we replace one object with another because they have certain similarities, we obviate their differences. We can focus on the aspects that were conveying the explanation but the differences may still influence us. That extra baggage goes unnoticed and it may affect our relationship with the new object.

Finding the right analogy to explain a complex topic is an art and some people are very good at it. Some metaphors that work for a certain audience don’t work for other people, or may have the opposite effect. And some metaphors are so embedded in our culture that we are not aware of them. How are they influencing us?

We are going to explore the use of metaphors in software, visual facilitation and everyday language. I will use the terms “metaphor” and “analogy” in a loose way, meaning the use of a term without its literal meaning.

In software

Steve McConnell in Code Complete explores the idea of metaphors to better understand software development. He says we can benefit from them to give insight into problems and processes.

McConnell suggests software is “writing” and “farming”, but he prefers “construction” [1, p. 9]. The images of “building”, “scaffolding”, “architects”, “planning”, “blueprints”, “patterns” or “façade” are widespread in our industry (if you allow me the metaphor).

Kent Beck criticises the construction metaphor in Extreme Programming Explained [2, p. 104] arguing that it is extremely difficult to reverse progress in the construction world and discussing the importance of when to design.

Beck also compares Extreme Programming to driving a car [2, p. 12]: customers drive the content of the system and the whole team drives the development process. Alistair Cockburn says software is a cooperative game. Eric Raymond a bazaar.

We use the metaphor of space when talking about the Internet with terms such as “locations”, “communication roads”, “cyberspace”, “visiting”, “finding”, or “the information superhighway”.

Ward Cunningham introduced the financial analogy of the technical debt.

In interaction design, the desktop metaphor has been with us since created in 1970 at Xerox PARC. It uses files, folders, windows, forms, a desk, and a trash can.

The analogy of naming servers after “cattle not pets” used in DevOps also uses previous knowledge and makes its point clear. Like the “coal mine canary” does.

Cybersecurity uses metaphors about burglars and treasures, always talking about protecting a space. Common terms are “attack”, “walls”, “locks”, “keys”, “doors”, or “vaults”. Some have suggested a pest metaphor [3], an immune system or a medical health metaphor [4]. Would we approach cybersecurity in a different way using them?

Map, resource pool, web, queue, stack, index, tree, package, library, object, label, cookie, fork, branch, sandbox, triggers, semaphore, filter, and pipe are other words we use to refer to abstract concepts in software [5]. Probably, the level of abstraction we use makes metaphorical language a necessity.

Can you think of other metaphors used in software?

In graphics and facilitation

When doing visual facilitation or visual recording, metaphors come in handy. Sometimes the actual narrative contains an explicit metaphor that just needs to be visualised. Other times the facilitator or the visual recorder create a metaphor to describe the content. Dave Sibbet in Visual Meetings [6, p. 42] suggests different options, and in The world of visual facilitation [7, p. 294] they also explore their use in multicultural environments.

Some of the metaphors I’ve seen are “the iceberg”, “the journey”, “climbing the mountain”, or “the bridge”. The iceberg is used to describe hidden risks or obstacles. The journey is handy to describe a long story with events and an end goal. The mountain serves a similar purpose but expressing the difficulties or the challenge. The bridge allows us to describe a solution with the previous and future, or current, state.

More creative recorders add more art to their work and invent ad hoc metaphors to every sketchnote or visual recording.

In team retrospectives, there are a few visual metaphors that have been used for a long time, because they help teams discuss events from multiple angles maintaining a certain emotional distance. For instance, the saliboat retrospective allows participants to put post-its on the items they think are giving energy and moving them forward, putting them on the wind or on the sails. They can reflect on things that slow them down putting items on the anchor. They can discuss their past putting notes on the island behind or on their future, with the island on the right. They can comment on risks with the sharks or the rocks. And they can be very creative adding whatever they want to the picture. I’ve seen pirates, cannons, ice cream, UFOs and hammocks!

You get the idea about triggering the conversation thanks to the metaphor and you don’t need a fancy visual to have it started. I’ve seen teams asking “if our last iteration was a football match, who was our goalkeeper? What was the controversial play? Who was our best supporter?” and so on.

In everyday language

Future is ahead or behind? Probably you will think that the future is ahead of you and your past is behind you, but there is no real relationship between time and direction. For the speakers of Aymara (spoken in Peru), looking ahead is looking at the past [8]. You have already experienced the past, it is known, you can see it as anything you see, in front of you. Mandarin Chinese speakers use up and down gestures to refer to time. Up is the past, down is the future.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, researchers of cognitive science and linguistics, state in Metaphors we live by [9] that the way we create concepts is metaphorical in nature. The way we think is based on metaphors: we try to understand and experience in terms of another thing we know. They add that some metaphors are completely arbitrary and part of our culture, and they shape the way we think.

Take the following conceptual metaphor: an argument is a war. With that idea these expressions come naturally:

• He attacked every weak point in my argument.
• Your claims are indefensible.
• She shot down all my arguments.

What if we had a culture where an argument is a dance? Imagine we expect participants as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasant way. We would see arguments in a very different way.

There are many ingrained metaphors, some of them shared across languages.

• Happy is up; sad is down (I am feeling down)
• More is up; less is down (His income fell last year)
• High status is up; low status is down (He’s climbing the ladder)
• The mind is a machine (He broke down)
• Love is a journey (We are at a crossroads)
• Understanding is seeing (It is clear now)

As these metaphorical constructions are coherent, metaphors make us fit new events into their explanation, reinforcing its power and creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Consequences

Replacing an already existing and accepted metaphor may be nearly impossible, but we can start paying attention to them, and assessing if they are affecting our underlying beliefs. When we create an analogy, we can pay attention to the extra impact it can add.

Take “maturity”, for instance. When we consider the assessment of the way we work under the lens of “maturity” we escape from the possibility of reducing the rate because things don’t “unmature”: there is only one direction, never going back.

Is there any other metaphor conditioning you?

Toni Tassani — 10 Mar 2026

This article was originally published on 17 May 2021 on the Ocado Technology intranet.

The Inuit live in the Arctic regions of Alaska, Greenland and Canada, always in freezing temperatures, and that’s why they have more than one hundred words to refer to snow. We don’t have as many words in English, so we cannot be as precise as they are when talking about it. Their world has influenced their language and now their language influences how they perceive and think.

As intuitive as this story sounds, it is not true. It comes from a misunderstanding from Benjamin Lee Whorf of how these people construct words but many people consider it to be true [1].

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, also known as linguistic relativity, suggests that the structure of a language affects the way people think and perceive their world. Named after Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, American anthropologists and linguists, this idea has been criticised and refuted.

For instance, there are languages that don’t have different words for the colours green and blue, named grue languages, but speakers of these languages have no problem distinguishing the two colours [2]. The same thing happens to the Zuñi people in New Mexico, that don’t have different words for orange and yellow [3]. The constraints in their language do not affect their perception.

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

― Juliet in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet

Influencing cognition

The linguist Lera Boroditsky provided very interesting examples about how language influences our thinking in her 2017 TED Talk, How language shapes the way we think [4].

There are languages that cannot express quantities, they don’t have numbers so they cannot use arithmetic as we know it.

She has studied an Aboriginal community in Pormpuraaw, Australia. They don’t have the words for “left” and “right” but they describe the location of objects by compass directions: north, south, east and west. They are used to knowing at every moment where the north is. They will refer to their “east foot” and they will not get confused talking about “your right, not my right”. They are not biologically equipped differently, but they have included this skill in their language and culture. Their usual greeting, instead of “hello”, is an exchange like “where are you going?”, “south-southeast”.

Some languages like Chinese don’t have grammatical forms to talk about present and future. Keith Chen, a professor of economics at UCLA, has found that Chinese people are more likely to save money than people who use languages that can express the future. It seems that if you can’t depict in your language your future-self it’s less likely you think about them as a different person, and you will make more considerate decisions.

Language is very powerful. Language does not just describe reality. Language creates the reality it describes.

― Desmond Tutu

The way our language uses to report events also influences how we remember them. Imagine a case where a vase was accidentally broken. It is natural for English speakers to report who broke it as in, “Veronica broke the vase”. Saying “the vase has been broken” would be perceived as trying to conceal the author. However, in Spanish the natural thing to do would be to omit the subject and this affects how we remember the event.

Left to right and right to left

In the film Arrival, Amy Adams plays a linguist who is deciphering an alien language, and by understanding better their language her perception of time changes. That is fiction, but Boroditsky reports other ways perception of time and space is influenced by language. In an experiment [5] she asked people to sort people pictures chronologically. People who are used to languages that are written left to right used that direction. People from Pormpuraaw, mentioned before, first had to determine where they were facing, and then organised the pictures from east to west. And people writing right to left, like in Hebrew, positioned the pictures in that order.

About right to left language. Long ago I saw a picture of a kanban board that seemed to have the columns in the “wrong” order, having done items on the left. I found the cover of the Hebrew version of Agile kids - Who’s the boss of me? with the sticky notes on the right, instead of on the left, so I asked the author, Shirly Ronen-Harel. She said that in Hebrew they write right to left, except numbers, that are left to right. In professional environments, a visualisation board would use left to right like in English because they are used to it, but for kids she suggested right to left to be less confusing. I found it really interesting!

The gender case

There are different ways a language can represent gender. Some languages have natural gender, with the capacity to differentiate living male things, such as boys, fathers, and uncles, from living female things such as girls, mothers, and aunts. In English there is “he” and “she” to make this kind of distinction, but “they” can be used to refer to a singular third person if the gender doesn’t have to be specified.

Other languages have grammatical gender, so that all nouns have an assigned gender, regardless whether they are naturally masculine or feminine. Instead of using an equivalent to the neutral “it” they use the equivalent to “he” or “she” to refer to every noun. Pronouns, adjectives, possessives and so on, also have masculine and feminine declination.

The gender is completely arbitrary and it causes confusion when learning these languages. For instance, “sun” is masculine in Spanish and feminine in German, and “moon” is feminine in Spanish and masculine in German.

To have a second language is to possess a second soul.

― Charlemagne

Does the arbitrary gender influence how the speaker thinks? It turns out that Lera Boroditsky asked subjects to describe certain words and participants chose adjectives that were usually attributed to the grammatical gender of the word. For example, the word “key”, is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish. For German speakers it was “hard”, “heavy” and “useful”, and for Spanish speakers it was “little”, “lovely” and “tiny”. A “bridge”, feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, for German speakers was “beautiful” and “elegant”, and for Spanish speakers was “dangerous” and “strong” [5].

How do these languages handle non-binary people? Do they have to be referred with the binary articles, determinants and adjectives? In English, not having a prevalent grammatical gender, it is easier, but words like “actor” and “actress”, “prince” and “princess” or “waiter” and “waitress” have to be adapted. For other languages, there are some initiatives trying to promote gender neutral language in German, Spanish, Polish and others, even though it is not widely accepted.

The value of diversity

There are more than 7,000 languages in the world. Each language creates a filter for their speakers that, somehow, seems to affect the way they perceive and think. The more ways of thinking we add to solve problems, the more options we’ll have to solve them.

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

― George Bernard Shaw

Toni Tassani — 24 Oct 2022

This article was originally published on 10 May 2021 on the Ocado Technology intranet.

Language is another topic that fascinates me, in all its possible dimensions including body language and visual language. If you know me, you will know that I love to talk about the language of comics and the power of metaphors, but today I will focus just on narrative and choice of words. The words you choose to write, speak and think will influence how people interact with you and how you experience life.

Some words may evoke power (boss, rule) or maybe helplessness (permission, brittle). Words are not completely innocuous. Some words have a loaded meaning for a group while being clean for others.

A person can say “I’ve been assigned this project” and “they’ve thrown this project at me” describing the same facts, but will feel very differently about it.

Words are, in my not so humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic, capable of both inflicting injury and remedying it.

― Albus Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2

Organisational culture and language

In the book Tribal Leadership [1] the authors suggest that it is possible to tell the level of collaboration of a group by the words they use and the relationships they create. They suggest five stages.

At stage one the main theme is “life sucks”. People at this stage use the language of gangs and prisons and they share a sensation of despair and hostility. Only 2 per cent of American professionals operate at this stage, according to the authors.

At stage two the sentiment changes to “my life sucks”, and it is shared by 25 per cent of professionals. Scott Adams’ Dilbert and The Office exhibit this culture. People are disconnected from organisational concerns, show passive-aggressive behaviour and sarcasm and cynicism are prevalent.

Stage three, according to this model, is the dominant culture in 49 per cent of the working population. “I’m great” or, more fully, “I’m great, and you’re not” is the theme. Performance is measured individually and there is a belief that knowledge is power. Employees at stage two have bosses at stage three. The keywords “I”, “me”, and “my” exemplify this individualistic culture.

At stage four, in 22 per cent of the workplace population, the theme is “we’re great”, or “we’re great, and they are not”, as there is always an adversary to beat. The idea of “the common enemy” is also encouraged in Ray Immelman’s model described in Great Boss, Dead Boss [2]. There is “tribal pride”. People see themselves as a tribe, with a common purpose and shared core values. There is a language of “we”, “our”, “team”, “them”, and “commit”.

Stage five is in less than 2 per cent of workplace tribal cultures. They have the sentiment of “life is great”. The language is around infinite potential and making history —not to beat a competitor. This is a stage of vision and inspiration, but it is an ephemeral stage that quickly returns to stage four.

The authors suggest that you cannot move more than one stage at a time. You cannot go from stage two to stage four without going through stage three. They provide practical coaching advice to influence the language in use so that people can operate from stage four, and aspire to have periods of stage five if possible.

Leadership is language

Another author, David Marquet, emphasises the importance of language. He was a US submarine captain who prepared himself to command a nuclear submarine, learning all the technical details of that specific ship, but was assigned to a different one at the last minute. He found himself commanding a ship with a demotivated crew and he could not give orders, because he didn’t know how things worked there. So he decided to stop giving orders. In Turn the ship around [3] he describes how he asked the crew to voice what they were about to perform, instead of asking for permission or waiting for an order, using the formula “I intend to…” You can watch his story and the explanation of intent-based leadership in a beautifully animated short video [4].

He realised the importance of language and has been investigating and consulting since then. He collected his findings in his second book Leadership is Language [5]. Marquet affirms “changing our words changed our world”. He says that they succeeded by replacing the following elements:

• A reactive language of “convince, coerce, comply, and conform” with a proactive language of “intent and commitment to action”
• A language of “prove and perform” with a language of “improve and learn”
• A language of “invulnerability and certainty” with a language of “vulnerability and curiosity”

They focused on achieving excellence, not avoiding errors. On “getting better”, not “being good”. This is similar to the attitude Brandy Agerbeck takes to practice and improvement when she replaces the saying “practice makes perfect” with “practice makes progress” in The Graphic Facilitator’s Guide [6, p. 268]. And to Kent Beck saying “perfect is a verb” in Extreme Programming Explained [7, p. 28].

The words and the story

It is not only the choice of words but also the stories you build around the things that happen. In front of the same event, of the same objective situation, we can create multiple stories. These possible narratives are options we can take.

David Marquet also talks about the importance of the mindset, as described by Carol Dweck in her book with the same title, Mindset [8]. Dweck, a researcher in the field of psychology, found that the view you adopt of yourself affects the way you lead your life. Mindsets are just beliefs and you have a choice. You can believe that your abilities are fixed in you and cannot be changed much (fixed mindset) or that your abilities can be developed and changed (growth mindset). In the fixed mindset, failure can be transformed from an action (“I failed”) to an identity (“I am a failure”). Recognising effort instead of success and learning from criticism instead of avoiding feedback are some traits of the growth mindset. In her research, she found that people influenced by the growth mindset (remember that it is a choice), performed better.

In an episode of the podcast Coaching For Leaders [9] they invited Andrea Wanerstrand who leads the global coaching programs at Microsoft. She said that the main focus there was to cultivate the growth mindset.

Words to create identity

In a biblical story, the Ephraimites and the Gileadites had a great battle. The Gileadites defeat the Ephraimites and set a blockade in the Jordan River to prevent the Ephraimites from returning to their territory. To identify and kill these Ephraimites, the Gileadites told each suspected survivor to say the word shibboleth. As in the Ephramites dialect there was no sound sh, they were unmasked and slaughtered.

In modern English a shibboleth is a linguistic distinctive, jargon or way of pronouncing, that allows to identify another as a member or not-member of a group. The purpose is inclusive (feeling of belonging) and also exclusive (telling who is not part of the group). You can read the Wikipedia entry to find multiple usages of shibboleths throughout history.

Beware when your efforts to create a sensation of belonging isolate the group.

Another sign to watch is dehumanising language, an usual predecessor of human atrocities [10].

Self-talk

Some of the explanations we build will stay only in your head, in your internal dialogue, your self-talk. Don’t you have conversations in your head? (“No, I don’t have them”. Yes! That conversation.) That conversation you have with yourself shapes how you perceive the world, and the good news is that you own it. You have relative control on the things that happen around you, but you can control how you think about them.

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.

― Viktor Frankl

Daniel Pink, author of Drive, The surprising truth about what motivates us, in his book To sell is human shares some research that suggests an interesting strategy to improve our efficacy: interrogative self-talk [11, p. 82]. Instead of positive or affirmative self-talk before tackling a challenging task, ask ourselves whether we will succeed or not. It seems that asking questions forces our brain to be actively seeking for answers. It works better for our motivation and lasts longer than encouraging ourselves. Interrogative self-talk may also inspire intrinsically motivated reasons to perform the goal, something that does not happen with declarative self talk. Why not try this?

Practical advice

In our feedback training there is a lot of good advice on how to give and receive feedback. Now that we are aware of the influence of the choice of words, we can be more mindful when receiving a message and listen beyond words. In particular, not to be trapped by a particular word.

Be careful when you say “I need”, “I have to” or “I must”. Do you mean what you say? And be cautious with “should”, as it means obligation.

When giving feedback, prefer “you have done” over “you are”, because qualifying someone may be perceived as an aggression. Even worse if it is not directly to the person. No need to gossip.

Avoid absolutes like “never” and “always”. Probably they are not true.

Consider adding “yet”, like in “I can’t do it… yet”.

Watch for the “but” that hides a “no”. As Tyrion Lannister was reminded, “nothing someone says before the word ‘but’ really counts”. If you can, prefer “yes, and” over “yes, but”. “And” builds.

Words, words, words

Words are important.

Can you think without words? For how long?

Can you be exposed to some written text in a language you know and not read it?

You own your choice of words. There are multiple angles to tackle the problem of being more conscious about the way we explain things to ourselves: mindfulness, cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), stoicism, neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), non-violent communication (NVC).

It is your choice.

Toni Tassani — 23 May 2022

This article was originally published on 3 May 2021 on the Ocado Technology intranet.