Sue Blow, research associate in the Coaching and Mentoring Research Unit at Sheffield Business School, looks at the use of metaphors for sharing meaning.
“When I use a word”, Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is”, said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”
– Alice Through The Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll, 1929
In the last issue, David Wagstaff discussed the notion of differing narratives. According to Morgan, the main vehicle for “story” is metaphor, and that has many applications in coaching. In an airport queue recently, I heard people asking each other: “Do you see what I mean?”, “Do you see what I’m saying?” Although both ask if the listener can visualise the speaker’s intention, the first asks about meaning and the second about the words themselves.
As coaches, much of what we do is involved with words and their meaning. But words are tricky things. A word shift or substitution can bring a completely new range of associations and nuances. In this Humpty Dumpty world of words, how do we achieve shared meaning with clients? Metaphors “are often the medium for understanding and presenting ideas, insights and intuitions not always available to analytic reasoning and discourse”. They take us into parable, story and narrative.
At a research day at Sheffield Business School on 2 October, themes emerged:
Whose metaphor is it? We made the distinction between offering a metaphor or simile and working with one created by the client. Familiar management metaphors came under the first. The client and coach work with the image, exploring options for reframing or producing a meaningful paradigm shift that visualises a different future state.
In the second were the images that emerge spontaneously in discussion (“The grass may be greener but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to swallow”) or are part of the client’s long-term self-image (“I am the lighthouse for the team”). These may give insights into the client’s sense of meaning.
Fixed or variable? Mental images, once imagined, take on a life of their own, and the individual may be reluctant to let go. Metaphors, though, have a transient nature: the client tells the story and owns the narrative, but can choose to tell another. Metaphors are both words and meanings.
Pain or pleasure? Metaphor provokes engagement, curiosity, even play. It can be a useful way of describing complexity or pain, especially for those who find sharing intense experiences hard. There can be value in using metaphor with clients with a different first language. In Gestalt, metaphor is a ‘transitional object’ to help clients ‘see’ difficult situations in new ways.
Permanent or ephemeral? Some metaphors seem to be ‘single use’: perhaps reflecting an ‘aha’ moment. Others are crafted images, offering a sustained way of understanding an issue over time, to be nurtured and revisited.
The creative fault line Metaphors are a version of reality as they have meanings. But the most fertile discussions can happen at the point where the metaphor no longer holds true.
According to Marshak “the creative and constructive use of symbolic language systems is a critical leadership competency, especially during organisational change”. He argues that if leaders are able to change outdated mental constructs, they can align followers with a new vision for the organisation. There is a parallel here for coaches: by working gracefully and flexibly with metaphor, boundaries can be explored and tested, meanings can be developed, changed and adapted and new ‘ways of being’ tried out in safety.
References
- See “Welcome to my World”.
- G Morgan, Images of Organisation, London: Sage, 1986; 2nd ed 1997.
- R J Marshak, “Managing the metaphors of change”, in Organizational Dynamics 22(1), 1993.
- Eg, as presented by C Handy, Gods of Management (rev ed), London: Pan Books, 1985; J Kotter, Our Iceberg is Melting, London: Pan Macmillan, 2006; R J Marshak (as above); and G Morgan (as above).
Volume 5, Issue 1