I was reminded of the power of metaphors while reading this wonderful passage from Joseph O’Neill’s novel, Netherland: “Like an old door, every man past a certain age comes with historical warps and creaks of one kind or another, and a woman who wishes to put him to serious further use must expect to do a certain amount of sanding and planing. But of course not every woman is interested in this sort of refurbishment project, just as not every man has only one thing on his mind.”
Metaphors in organisations can be useful, fruitful or constraining. Gareth Morgan wrote the masterwork on this many years ago – Images of Organisations. In my view, what we need now is a switching in conversations in organisations away from the metaphors of mechanics towards metaphors of organics. Less engineering, more nature. If organisations are complex, emergent, unpredictable, let’s conceive and talk of them in that way.
And a final quote from Netherland, where with deliberate irony, O’Neill’s narrator notes, “the steamboat of marriage must be fed incessantly with the coals of communication.”
Sat, 05/06/2010 - 13:23 | Paul
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
Subscribe to RSS feed