My response to a blog today reminded me of the impact our personal and organisational metaphors have on how we behave and how we judge ourselves and others. For example whether we see life as a game or a race will impact how we behave. Both are about winning but games require more interaction with the opposition in order to win. However if your life is more like a garden then winning isn’t important and it’s more to do with nurturing and growth. Imagine what happens when people who view life as a game try to relate to people who view it as a garden? Other metaphors may include:

• War: life and death situation, defence, winning at all costs, troops
• Family: support, nurture, family members
• Gardening: nurturing, seeds, growth, harvest, gardener, weeds
• Journey: hero, destination, steps
• Machine: components, specification, output, efficiency
• Race: start and finish, winning and losing, competitors
• Game: players, rules, wining, losing

(You may find you have additional descriptions for each of the metaphors as my personal metaphor will be impacting my description of all of the above.)

My operating metaphor is a garden with me as the gardener. As the type of garden I love the most are cottage gardens then I’m not wanting anything too regimented or formal. This means that I love supporting people to grow, giving them time to flourish, and allowing them to grow where ever they’ve landed. What I’m not good at is too much structure, weeding or other gardeners telling me what to do in my garden. When I realised this, and in order to improve my ability to work with others, I envisaged a much bigger garden, much like Chatsworth, with many different types of garden contained within it (formal, cottage, summer, park, water, woods, and so on) and each having a different gardener. I’m then one gardener working on a panel alongside other gardeners. It’s interesting since doing the visualisation to change the metaphor how many more opportunities to work with others have appeared.

Of course I don’t work so well with people who have war as an operating metaphor. I certainly don’t see many things as urgent life or death situations as you need the opposite and to have patience in a garden. I also don’t see there having to be winners and losers or enemies as there are in war metaphors. Can’t we all work together? Can you imagine how people operating a war metaphor find relating to me – very frustrating I would imagine.

I’d certainly encourage you to explore your operating metaphor and understand the impact it has on your life. Once you’ve done that it would be very interesting to explore the metaphors of others with whom you work, other departments and even organisationally and understand how the metaphors compliment or otherwise each other.