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.

Images help me understand and they attract my attention. I have a visual learning style and I have discovered that when I do the drawings the information sticks better with me. I have also discovered that they help my communication both in documents and in live explanations. If you enjoyed drawing as a kid and you think they could help your learning and communication, I have good news: you can learn.

I won’t tell you that we all can draw like Jurgen Appelo suggests in his “I can’t draw” video. I know many people who were not interested in drawing when they were kids and they are not now. And that’s OK. But if you are interested, continue reading.

I am not talking about artistic drawing, but about improving your notes and your whiteboard drawings. You will need to improve your eye-hand coordination, practice your hand muscles, find the right tools and learn some basic techniques. It can be done.

The purpose of visualisation is insight, not pictures!

― Ben Shneiderman

If you enjoy drawing, practice is not going to be painful.

Naming your practice

People come to use drawing in their daily work from different angles and they have been creating different names for their practice. Everybody is selling something, and they need a differentiator so you see value in their proposition. It is useful to know all these diverse names so you can use your favourite search engine to find more information.

Drawing in a large format and in front of an audience is called graphic recording, and you may have seen it in conferences. Here, the important thing is the final drawing that can be used to remember what was said. It is created live and there is no interaction between the recorder and the audience or the speaker. If it does not happen live, it is an illustration.

When the drawing happens in a similar setting, live in front of people, but with interaction between the recorder and the audience, it is called visual facilitation [1]. One of the pioneers in this area, Dave Sibbet, called them just visual meetings [2]. In this setting the important thing is not the final drawing but the conversations that take place, the process. As Brandy Agerbeck puts it, “it is the process, not the product” [3, p. 71].

In face to face conversations, mainly in sales situations, Dan Roam used the term back of the napkin [4]. In UX conversations, Mike Crothers coined presto sketching [5]. In informal settings Sunni Brown preferred to simplify and called them doodles [6]. Other people use the same ideas for personal organisation in bullet journals. Some people group all these formats into a catchall visual thinking and probably there are more names.

The term that I use more frequently is sketchnotes, popularised by Mike Rohde [7]. He talks about note-taking at conferences, using boxes, arrows and visuals so that you capture only the essential parts and what resonates with you, and that way it is more likely that you will review your notes in the future. You can use the technique for taking your notes at a conference, from a podcast or from a book, and it will help you to be present. “Sketchnotes are about capturing and sharing ideas, not about art” [7, p. 18]. Ideas, not art.

In some cases you draw on a notebook and others on a flip chart. Sometimes you can take your time to think and draw and other times you are drawing live in front of a group as fast as you can. In some situations you care only about the process and at other times you want to keep your final product. But the basics about visual notes stay the same.

Visual notes fundamentals

We are going to review the building blocks of your visual notes and we are going to skip some of them. We won’t discuss structure, hierarchy, lines, dividers, colour, shading and people, but there is no shortage of references out there in the internet.

Choose your tools

You need to find the pen and paper that better works for you. I want to enjoy my tools and I’ve tried a lot of them. Try paper of different sizes and thickness, bound and unbound (in a notebook or loose paper) and make your choice. Use a pencil if you have a better reason than “because I can erase”, because you have to love your mistakes. Consider trying pens with different thickness.

I like the feeling of Sharpies, but I don’t like that they smear on certain paper, they bleed on the other side and they have strong fumes. Check the traction of your marker on the surface. If it moves too fast it will be harder for you to control. It happens to me with ball-pens on a single sheet of paper on the table.

Digital tools are great, but don’t choose them because you can undo. Be brave.

For a long time I stuck to Staedtler pigment liner 0.05, 0.2 and 0.8 on a pocket-sized, plain paper, hardcover Moleskine.

Lettering

The first approach to drawing is drawing letters: writing. It is a usual recommendation to use capital letters because they give you more consistency. It is also useful to have more than one “font”, at least for titles, so you can have a visual hierarchy.

Practising handwriting is about repeating the alphabet, or short texts. There are going to be letters that you will have to relearn.

Brandy Agerbeck suggests an exercise repeating the alphabet three times: normal, perfect and fast, so that you can identify the letters you need to work on [3, p. 177].

Arrows

You can practice different arrow types to describe relationships between the elements or to guide their sequence.

Bullets

It is useful to have more than one type of bullet for your lists, while keeping consistency.

Containers

You can group parts of your notes in boxes or highlight special messages using containers. Most of the time it is better to write the text first and then add the container.

Icons

Some say there is a visual alphabet [8] of basic symbols that form what you draw (e.g. dots, lines and circles) whilst others consider that the important thing is a visual vocabulary [9], with the basic ideas you want to draw (e.g. light bulbs and magnifying glasses).

Taking visual notes is not about adding more drawings and using more icons. Some people have the tendency to create an icon for every term that is mentioned, something that Brandy names iconitis [3, p. 276]. Icons help, but they are not the main building block and they can slow you down.

To create your own collection of symbols, you can copy the icons on your phone, use thenounproject.com for inspiration, or create your own ones based on photos. You can also search in Twitter or Instagram for the hashtag #sketchabit that Eva-Lotta Lamm uses and you’ll see instructions on how to create certain icons. Some of them are in her reflection on visual alphabets [10]. They say that if you repeat the same image 50 times, it will stay as part of your personal visual vocabulary.

Practice, practice and practice

From now on it is up to you to practice and hone your skills. You have all the hints to find more references on the Internet, and you can find more in Sketchnote Hangout Resources [11].

Find the right tools for you and enjoy your new notes.

Toni Tassani — 9 May 2022

This article was originally published on 12 April 2021 on the Ocado Technology intranet.