Beyond 'War' & 'Sports': How about we expand our work metaphors?
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Written by Renée Smith
I had the joy of supporting my daughter, Faith, to give birth to her daughter, Minerva, on June 2.?
I’m home now, but still reflecting on the powerful experiences of pregnancy, labor, and birth and letting those inspire me and my work.
It strikes me that these experiences provide potent, rich metaphors for leadership and work, but we don’t often tap into them.?
Maybe they are too feminine, too intimate, or too unfamiliar to those usually in power. I’m not sure.?
But today, I invite you to reflect with me on a few aspects of pregnancy, labor, and birth for the insights they can provide us as metaphors.??
Common Organizational Metaphors
In business, we often invoke metaphors of sports and war.?
We work on “teams” and need “coaching.”?
We “play the long game” and talk about who is “up to bat” or “going out for a long pass” or who “struck out” on the sales call or who is an “all-star” or a “real team player”.?
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We use military references like, “If we are gonna slay our competition, we need a “battle plan” to “defeat the enemy.”?
We set up “war rooms” to coordinate the “front line” staff and when it’s all over we conduct an “after-action review.”
Those metaphors help us make sense of work in certain ways but they leave other things out.?
And their violence has consequences.?
For example, they open up options for competition but certainly shut down possibilities for collaboration or cooperation.?
Metaphors from Pregnancy and Birth
We would be well-served as teams and as humans to expand our organizational metaphors and embrace other human experiences that offer us new rich possibilities to make sense of work in compelling ways that are currently lost to us.?
We can begin with pregnancy and birth.?
Check out my latest podcast episode on 'To Work: With Love' by Gut+Science, where I discuss the INSPIRE model for practicing wholeness at work.