Metaphors for your organization

Metaphors are powerful.  They work because your conscious mind is limited in its bandwidth – it can focus on very few things at a given time.  When someone uses a metaphor to describe something, the power is two-fold.  First, you have the direct function of explanation – the person is engaging in description.  So, when you say that a company is like a living thing, you are describing it – its ebbs and flows, its cycles of growth, its genuine risk of mortality. 

But there’s something deeper going on as well.  When people describe their organizations, they default to three primary metaphors: the family, the team, and the nation at war.  Each of these gives and takes away.  Metaphors are powerful because what they give and what they take away happens almost entirely below the waterline of our conscious attention.  If someone can get you to think of your organization as a team or a family, all sorts of other semantic freight will come along with that.  Values (what is appropriate conduct within a family), goals (what is the goal toward which a team strives), and a thousand things besides. 

As a leader, how do you see your team?  How do you convey this metaphor to your team and to your organization?  How is this “frame” reinforces and how do the individual stories that you tell reinforce this shared way of making sense of the world.  The leaders who do this well do it on purpose, and it is a learnable skill.