#ThinkfullyHabit: Speak in riddles
You don't have to be a novelist or poet to make effective use of analogies. An analogy is simply a comparison of two things that show their similarities and takes a familiar idea to help explain a complex or new one.
Next time you are struggling with explaining a complex idea or finding a new solution to a challenge try asking yourself, “What it is like”? How could you complete the sentence, "Just like X, so too is Y", e.g. "Just like chlorine in water is a necessary evil to be able to swim in a public pool, so too are some unpleasant, but necessary aspects of organisational change." Or, "Just like when you learn to canoe it’s important to learn how to capsize and get back upright, so too can it be important to learn from failure when embarking on something new.
“Just like the stars shine with the night, our brains light up with the analogies we use.”
WHY?
Analogies are ways that help our brains make sense of information - they connect the known to the unknown; the familiar with the unfamiliar. They help the mind navigate new ideas by looking to the ideas we already know. They provide rapid shortcuts for making sense of ideas, help make the abstract more understandable and help problems become more solvable. The analogies that are most powerful are those based on deeply shared fundamental connections, not based on superficial similarity. However, psychologists have found that people typically make little effort to make the distinctions and readily make similarities they know to be superficial.
John Pollock, former presidential speechwriter to former US president Bill Clinton and the author of ‘The Hidden Power of Analogy’ gives three ways to improve our use of analogies 1) get better at spotting them being used 2) check their relevance (what is and isn’t so true and relevant) and 3) consider multiple analogies because different analogies shed different light on different aspects of the problem or challenge.*