Is It Time to Change the Metaphors You Use?

Peter Horne, a longtime member of Patty’s Pioneers, always has an eye-opening take on subjects that most of us don’t even think about. As he contemplated the metaphors we use to describe technology and systems (windows, clouds, client/server) he realized that comparing complex concepts to easily understandable everyday objects helps us get our heads around all the complexity. It is human nature to try to simplify things; to put the elusive into familiar concrete terms. As Peter states, “The classic example is the ‘Window’ which explained the new idea of a region on a screen with some content in it. It's not a window – it’s a region on a plate of glass that has colored dots turned on or off based on the bits in the machine’s memory allocated to describe the location and color of the dots on the screen. But to call it a window works as a metaphor, and so we use it.”

But he has also realized that the metaphors we have been using aren’t really working anymore—they aren’t sufficiently adaptive, or, in his words, “Metaphors are getting overused to the point where they become recursive and confusing.” And he offers this example to make the point: “Today you can have a real machine running a virtual machine which is hosting several Java virtual machines which are running application servers which have separate containers which run components which are providing services—which, if you wanted to, you could program directly to run on a single standalone machine. And, increasingly, the standalone machine is also a device performing server functions, rather than being a traditional server.” Oops, no wonder our business and techies can’t understand one another.

So he proposes that we use metaphors rather than similes to help clarify concepts. (For those of you who have forgotten 9th grade English class, a simile says that something is “like” something else—e.g., her eyes are like sunken pools of azure; a metaphor says that something “is” something else—her eyes are sunken pools of azure.) One of his (more on point) examples is “if you are designing aircraft control systems, what if you use the ‘pilot’ metaphor to its extreme? It’s not like an autopilot; it is a pilot.”

He also proposes that if the metaphors you’re using in a particular domain are breaking down (as they seem to be in the IT world), it’s probably time for a new set of metaphors.

A new set of metaphors gives you a new mental model or context within which to frame solutions. It’s the starting point for innovation.

I found Peter’s discussion fascinating, and I hope that you will too. So read on!

New Metaphors Spur Innovation
How We Describe Things Impacts How We Think about Using Them
By Peter Horne, Member, Patty’s Pioneers, March 7, 2013