Sport as metaphor for life

In a provocative piece in Melbourne’s The Age, the columnist Tim Soutphommasane asserts that Australia’s current malaise on the cricket field “may also say something about the state of the nation… cricket as a metaphor for life.”

Has he not noticed that, while Europe and North America have struggled to get any semblance of forward motion, the economy in Australia has remained in robust health?

I'm always leary about sport/society metaphors. When I lived in Sydney in the early 1980s, Australia went crazy about their "historic" winning of the ultimate prize in sailing, the America's Cup. However, the strong feeling of euphoria accompanied a deep national slide into recession...

And the man behind the achievement, entrepreneur Alan Bond, was eventually sent to prison for fraud.

Now how do you decode all that, metaphorically?

Literally?

“She is literally a shining star at work.”

“It was the end of the line - literally.”

“We shall literally be up s**t creek without a paddle.”

Why is it that people say “literally”, when they mean “metaphorically”?

Is there something deeply difficult in understanding the difference?

Ease with metaphor is crucial to creativity.

Metaphor and the barcode

Here’s another game-changing innovation imagined sitting on the beach. Not perhaps as inspiring in its way as the cochlea implant, but tremendously important just the same.

Joseph Woodland, a graduate student at the Drexel Institute of Technology, noticed that the institute had been asked by a local chain of grocery retailers to figure out a way to encode product data, so that the checkout process could be automated. This was 1948.

One day, sitting on the beach, “I poked my four fingers into the sand and for whatever reason – I don’t know – I pulled my hand toward me and drew four lines,” he told Smithsonian magazine many years later.

And, thinking of the Morse code he had learned in Boy Scouts, Woodland realised that lines of varying widths could be turned into a code. He worked with a colleague, Bernard Silver, to develop a bullseye solution, but it didn’t catch on. So they sold the patent.

Over the next two decades, manufacturers and retailers developed a range of systems, and in the early 1970s a standardised approach emerged. It’s now estimated that barcodes are scanned some five billion times a day, saving trillions of dollars/pounds etc.

Joseph Woodland died ten days ago, on 9 December 2012, aged 91.

Metaphor and the Seashell

New inventions can take years from the start of the process to realisation. Sometimes decades. With lots of creative problem-solving necessary along the way.

But occasionally there’s a key barrier that appears insuperable and the people involved just can’t imagine that there could be a solution at all, let alone what that solution might look like.

That was the case for Sydney doctor, Graeme Clark, and his team, who were working on ways to bring back hearing to people with deafness problems by tapping into the cochlea part of the ear. The basic idea was to introduce electrodes into it.

The problem was: how to squeeze twenty wires into a curling tube within the ear, where the available gap was no wider than a needle.

Then, one day, Clark was on the beach and looking at a Turban shell. Picking up some blades of grass, he discovered that they had exactly the right combination of flexibility and stiffness to enable him to push them into the shell, curling around until they reached the centre.

Eureka!

This was exactly the mechanical principle used for electrodes in the cochlea implant – an invention that became known as the bionic ear – giving back hearing to thousands.

 

Aristotle and the Power of Metaphor

“To be a master of metaphor is the greatest thing by far,” said Aristotle. “It is the one thing that cannot be learned from others. And it is also a sign of genius.”

I believe that facility with metaphor is at the very heart of creativity. Yet when I introduce the subject in training workshops, there usually descends a look of apprehension, even fear, shortly followed by an apparently semi-hypnotic state, as though the mere mention of the term has induced a measure of psychic paralysis.

I wonder why this is so? In my own school days we were taught the meaning of metaphor alongside simile and analogy, as though defining them would in some mysterious way set free our ability to use them freely. Not so. It’s practice that counts.

In my old company, Synectics, we sidestepped the whole issue by talking about “excursions”, which seemed to me to be in practice a practical way of getting into metaphor without using the mesmerising term itself.

(Have you noticed how many suggestive metaphors exist in this brief piece alone?)

Discovering new oceans

It’s sad, when something profound has been written, to find it consistently attributed to the wrong person, or even to Anon.

What’s more, I’ve done this myself. When I put together the Imagine book for Synectics, I had no idea where the following quote came from. I just knew it was important. So I attributed it to the aforesaid Mr Anon. Here it is:

“One cannot discover new oceans without consenting, for a long time, to lose sight of the shore.”

I certainly was not alone. And even in the age of the World Wide Web, it’s still said to be by that prolific unknown author, or, sometimes, extraordinarily, by Christopher Columbus.

Well, in fact it’s from Les faux-monnayeurs [The Counterfeiters], a novel by the French writer and Nobel Prizewinner, André Gide, published in 1925.

And what a vivid metaphor it is. Fundamental to success in the creative process.

(The portrait of Gide, above, is a detail from “The reading by Emile Verhaeren” by Théo van Rysselberghe.)

Connecting with metaphor

If you catch a cold when things go badly, you’re using metaphor.

If you reach for low hanging fruit when you want immediate success, you’re using metaphor. If you decide to get focussed, deploy new tactics, develop a strategy, attack the competition at their weakest point, launch a new product – you’re using metaphor.

If your sales spike, or peak, or plummet, or plateau, or even are smokin’. Or maybe you’re pushing water uphill. You’re using metaphor.

If you’re going all the way, or the extra mile, or the full nine yards. If you build castles in the air, or on rocky ground. If you’re feeling fragile, or bubbly, or the shadow of your usual self. If you saw it coming, or are in a mental cul-de-sac.

If you have a heart of stone, or, better, of a lion. If you are the light in my life. My North, my South, my East, my West. If you had better pull your socks up. If you’re drowning in work, or jumping for joy. If you’re the apple of my eye. If it’s raining cats and dogs. If you can charm the birds out of the trees. If you’re cold to someone, or coarse, or hard, or flexible, or polished, or soft, or sparky, or seedy. You’re using metaphor.

The theatre and opera director, Jonathan Miller, once wrote: “Since finding out what something is, is largely a matter of discovering what it is like, the most impressive contribution to the growth of intelligibility has been made by the application of suggestive metaphors.”

And since so many of our best new ideas spring from the use of metaphor in making new connections, often quite accidentally, it’s probably best to get good at using it as a more systematic tool in creativity.

As PG Wodehouse put it: “I pressed down on the mental accelerator. The old lemon throbbed fiercely. I got an idea.”

Now that’s the spirit…

Quoting Shakespeare

In 1986 Bernard Levin wrote this scintillating piece on William Shakespeare’s enduring invasion of the English language. It also shows the playwright's extraordinary grasp of the power of metaphor:

If you cannot understand my argument, and declare "It's Greek to me", you are quoting Shakespeare; if you claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you recall your salad days, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you act more in sorrow than in anger, if your wish is father to the thought, if your lost property has vanished into thin air, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you have ever refused to budge an inch or suffered from green-eyed jealousy, if you have played fast and loose, if you have been tongue-tied, a tower of strength, hoodwinked or in a pickle, if you have knitted your brows, made a virtue of necessity, insisted on fair play, slept not one wink, stood on ceremony, danced attendance (on your lord and master), laughed yourself into stitches, had short shrift, cold comfort or too much of a good thing, if you have seen better days or lived in a fool's paradise - why, be that as it may, the more fool you, for it is a foregone conclusion that you are (as good luck would have it) quoting Shakespeare; if you think it is early days and clear out bag and baggage, if you think it is high time and that that is the long and short of it, if you believe that the game is up and that truth will out even if it involves your own flesh and blood, if you lie low till the crack of doom because you suspect foul play, if you have your teeth set on edge (at one fell swoop) without rhyme or reason, then - to give the devil his due - if the truth were known (for surely you have a tongue in your head) you are quoting Shakespeare; even if you bid me good riddance and send me packing, if you wish I were dead as a door-nail, if you think I am an eyesore, a laughing stock, the devil incarnate, a stony-hearted villain, bloody-minded or a blinking idiot, then - by Jove! O Lord! Tut, tut! for goodness' sake! What the dickens! But me no buts - it is all one to me, for you are quoting Shakespeare.

Does anyone else come close?

Metaphor and creative fertility

At Thursday’s masterclass, Turning Ideas into Action, I introduced the use of metaphor in creative thinking. “Give us an example,” I was challenged.

So I talked about Alastair Pilkington doing the washing up, observing the grease floating on top of the water, and imagining a new way of producing plate glass. “No good” was the response from a feisty (and knowledgeable) group. That’s just an extension of scientific knowledge, not a real metaphor, and anyway, apparently it wasn’t really Pilkington who made that breakthrough.

Hmmm.

Well, how about the invention of Pringles?

The founders of Synectics, Bill Gordon and George Prince, made the use of metaphoric “excursions” a central part of their methodology. A special favourite for them was to explore metaphors from nature.

In the 1960s Gordon worked with Procter and Gamble to find a new way to make potato chips. The problem for consumers was that existing products would fracture far too easily, resulting in piles of broken bits at the bottom of the bag. And the problem for manufacturers was that bags of chips are full of air – making the shipping of product unnecessarily expensive.

One fall, Gordon was sweeping leaves in his back yard. On sunny days he noticed that the leaves were crisp, just like potato chips. And when he put them in a bag they fractured and crumbled. But on rainy days he noticed that the leaves moulded easily one to another with no breakages. Thus the idea for Pringles was born, solving both consumer and manufacturer problems at one and the same time.

The British theatre and opera director (and astounding polymath), Dr Jonathan Miller, has written: “Since finding out what something is is largely a matter of discovering what it is like, the most impressive contribution to the growth of intelligibility has been made by the application of suggestive metaphors.”

More succinctly (though less politically correctly), the Spanish philosopher-poet Ortega y Gassett wrote: “The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by men.”

Do you have good examples of the use of suggestive metaphor in creativity – either your own or others?

Metaphor and the Art of Naval Warfare

Did you see Peter Weir’s film Master and Commander? It’s a great favourite of mine, as are several of Weir’s movies.

Having left the Galapagos Islands, where the ship’s surgeon, Maturin, and young Midshipman Blakeney have collected armfuls of newly discovered species (and spotted the enemy – the British ship is being pursued in the South Atlantic by a larger, better-armed French frigate). Maturin and Blakeney show the skipper, Jack Aubrey (brilliantly played by Russell Crowe), what appears to be a twig. It is in fact a phasmid, “an insect that disguises itself as a stick in order to confuse its predators,” says young Blakeney.

Intrigued, Aubrey conceives the idea of re-dressing his British warship as a harmless whaler, a “nautical phasmid”, luring the enemy into a trap. “I had no idea that a study of nature could advance the art of naval warfare,” says Aubrey.

Metaphors such as this are often the springboard for breakthrough ideas. As the Spanish philosopher, Ortega y Gasset puts it: “The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by men.”

Do you have favourite ones that have led to Eureka moments?