Our methodology was to ask six exceptional communicators who work with all sizes of organizations in a lot of different verticals what metaphors they hear most often in their business scenes.  Those surveyed included a financial analyst, an academic, an artist, a social media director for a large tech company, a brand strategist and someone I’d describe as a ‘narratologist,’ who coaches organizations on storytelling. We limited the focus of the survey to internal communication for two reasons:

1) External communication like PR, advertising and social media, is how companies represent themselves to the rest of the world.  In this context, metaphors are frequently used as a means of persuasion, and are often more about what a company or brand wants to happen than what is actually happening. Because these metaphors serve a different purpose and have a different trajectory, they have to be analyzed separately.

2) Internal communication, by comparison, describes a company’s process, environment and character.  The metaphors used internally reflect reality, because they are used to initiate or define action.  For this reason they often represent an underlying ethos, and describe how the people in an organization go about their business.

A few of the respondents’ observations:

“Maybe this would change with a few female managers, but most men I work with are all about ‘playing offense’, ‘launching a counterattack’, ‘leading from the front’,  and ‘winning the battle but losing the war’.”

“Way heavier on war references or warlike verbs:  Insert, manage, acquire, degrade, demand, battle, launch, attack, defend…”

“I also wonder as more women get into biz if the primary metaphors change.  Meaning, less sports and war, more family and home metaphors?  Especially if this whole social thing works out? (tongue firmly in cheek)”

“Think of the top headlines, of any ‘this product is killing this product’, ‘death of X’, etc.”

“Sports also present…anything that’s zero sum and can be ‘won’ lends itself.”

“I also hear (more recently) about scientific references like ‘if you observe it, you change it’.”

‘I do hear a bit about chess and board games, typically in terms of ‘looking at the whole board’, ’sacrificing your queen’, and ‘thinking through the endgame’.

The business opportunity is clear.  Over two-thirds of all business communication relies on only two metaphors—war and sports.  Not only have we worn them out, they do not address the voracious appetite of a networked business environment for fresh narratives and new ways of relating to the world. To do that, we need fresh metaphors.  They are out there in the world, and in abundance.  Games are beginning to have their day.  And there have always been organizations that see themselves as Family.  The most upside, I believe, lies in the ‘Other’ category.  Big, expressive, thematically rich subjects—music and dance, cooking, biology, quantum mechanics, farming, to name a few—can invigorate your organizational vocabulary.  They help transform your narrative from the mundane and predictable to the artful and unexpected.  And that’s what you want in a story, any story.  So start planting, and see what grows!

(A coda to this post in light of what happened yesterday in Arizona, when a mentally disturbed gunman killed six people during his attempt to assassinate Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords: The metaphors of war—and the violence they glorify—have polarized the U.S. politically to a dangerous degree. Yesterday’s events add a raw and desperate urgency to the quest for new ways of seeing and engaging with one another. The metaphors of war attract fear-driven fringe characters looking for absolutes, either-ors, and final solutions, to the problems confronting us. To these people, nothing says final like the end of a gun barrel. The narratives of war trample on the tender shoots of new ideas, and marginalize people participating in the new narratives, people like Congresswoman Giffords, who champion peaceful co-existence, believe in yes-and, and who understand that yesterday’s solutions don’t work in today’s world.)

And then this article by Errol Morris in the New York Times came across the network this morning, the hook being a quote from Walt Disney (”I only hope that we don’t lose sight of one thing — that It Was All Started By A Mouse.“) as its headline. I’d already seen the link a couple of times when Howard Green from Disney Studios called to invite me to a tribute for Walt’s recently-departed nephew, Roy Disney, on Sunday at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood.   Suddenly the universe was in my ear bigtime, whispering that I had to click on the link to the Morris article. Something was there to be discovered….

The article itself is a photo essay and dialogue with photojournalist Ben Curtis about the forensics of war photography, the context of image vs. imagemaker, the technological challenges and dangers that come with altering photos to create propaganda or enhance a certain point of view. The kind of stuff in which Morris specializes. After I got the context, I began skimming. But I kept coming back to a photo by Curtis that led off the article:

In seeing the photo, I found what had been missing over the holidays. I might have decided to be resolute, I was still waffling on a theme, what, exactly I’d be resolute about. This photo resolved that. I wrote the following Comment on the Morris piece:

Errol

As our old friend Onosko, who worked at the House of Mouse for many years, might have said, you’re making it more complicated than it is. Focusing on the cosmetic level of communication–the toy itself, the shards of glass, the smoke, the interaction between imagemaker and image–is a fascinating narrative, and yields neverending complexity, but this complexity obscures meaning instead of bringing it to light. How Mickey got there is not nearly as important as the meta and emotional levels of the communication: War’s awfulest tragedies are its children.

Until we begin thinking of children first–begin with the Mice!, that what Walt would’ve done–War will be an adult theme park where children get crippled, grow old and perish before their time.

And so, finally, thanks to Howard and Errol and Ben, I have it — my New Year’s theme — the thing I can be Resolute about:  Be Nice to the Mice.

Hit it, Kid!

Scene: Microhoogle. A strong player like Microsoft will usually dominate a scene with a weaker player confused about its identity like Yahoo is. By being the more aggressive player, Microsoft has painted Yahoo’s ‘character’ in their scene as, by turns, a ‘collegial acquisition’, ‘a hostile takeover’, ‘an unfaithful tart’, ‘an overpriced stock’ and, as of this week, ‘just friends who talk on the phone a lot but there’s nothing serious going on between us, swear…no seriously, you guys, swear!’ Yahoo tried to ignite a bidding war by introducing Google to the scene, but all it did was diminish Yahoo’s status in the eyes of the audience by reminding everyone that this scene is really about Microsoft vs. Google. The best Yahoo can do is control the timing and style of the edit (i.e. the selling strategy). When a confused player is onstage too long, an edit is inevitable.

Scene: Get It While You Can. What lines of work are the closest and most loyal friends of the Bush administration in? Oil and War. These friends have approximately 230 days before they get edited, and their way-too-cozy contracts go up for review. Variations of the ‘Get It While You Can’ scene will play out over and over and over again in that 230 days, to the chagrin of most taxpayers and increasing stress on the U.S. economy. Petroleum producers will lock up all the mineral and drilling rights they possibly can, and oil prices (and profits) will go as high as Big Oil can push them, drivers be damned. With amplification by their many friends in the media, the players in the war game will present countless worrisome scenarios and justifications for buffering national security, and will load up on inventory that will move off the shelves much more slowly if, God forbid, we’re not fighting at least a couple of wars somewhere in the world. The Scott McClellan book release is a variation of this scene. Mr. McClellan may be assuaging his conscience or getting revenge, maybe both; he is also getting it while he can.

Scene: Inherit the Windmill. On May 15, Mesa Power, an energy company run by longtime oil player, T. Boone Pickens, announced a $2 billion investment in GE wind turbines. Superior improvisers are able to play in the moment while at the same time seeing the big picture. For an oilman like Pickens to invest in the wind takes some improvisation skill, and this looks like an excellent initiation of a new scene for Mesa Power. He and his team are seeking transformation and acting on environment, both of which are fundamentals of good improv. Pickens is taking a long view, while at the same time seeing (and to a certain extent participating in) what’s happening in the next 239 days. Sensing how weary the audience is going to get with the ‘Get It While You Can’ scenes, Mesa is preparing to offer alternatives, not only wind, but natural gas, too. That’s good improv.

Scene: Coca Cola and Honest Tea. The online version of Inc. reports this week that after making an investment in Bethesda, MD- based Honest Tea, the Coca-Cola Company has offered its support to Bethesda Green, a community sustainability program sponsored by Honest Tea. As part of its support, Coke is buying 20 to 30 recycling containers that will be placed in high-traffic areas around the city. Honest Tea says that 300 people turned out to participate in the launch of Bethesda Green’s first container. The analysis: In improv theater, when a normally high-status player plays low-status — a pompous Dignitary gets brought low, or the Housekeeping Staff governs the Governor — the audience loves it. The same dynamic appeals to the marketplace. When a mighty brand like Coke assumes the low-status role of Trash Recycler, our very human reaction is to applaud the move, just like we do when a little brand like Honest Tea grows in status through its partnership with Coke. The other note here is that ‘giving gifts’ of support are the strongest moves an improviser can make. It is what we see Coke doing in this scene. It is a sweet move, with no corn fructose involved.

Scene: Ninety Percent Pessimism. Forbes.com reports this week that a May survey conducted by Reuters and the University of Michigan shows that consumers are feeling worse about the economy that at any time since 1980. 90% of American consumers, the survey says, feel that U.S. economy is in the tank. One of the first things you learn as an improviser is that negativity gets you nowhere. The very fact that you are judging your scene as being bad while you’re in it guarantees that your scene, will, in fact, be bad. Improvisers operate from a positive frame of mind, always. They greet setbacks or mistakes as opportunities to change direction, try new things, find more productive paths. The way a business improviser might see the Forbes survey is that 90% pessimism describes huge marketplace demand for optimism.

We got an occasional hint that he’d experienced his share of awfulness. We did not own guns, and we did not allow hunting on our land, anomalies among the farm families from our neck of the woods. My uncle once told me my dad had been in an ambush where only he and another guy in his unit survived. When we balked at eating all the food on our plates, he would sometimes end the dispute by declaring flatly: “You’ve never seen people starving to death.” He was right. We had not. And so we’d soldier on, through the boiled beets or the cauliflower, wondering all the while who he’d seen starving to death, and why.

Late in his life, he opened up a little bit about the war, as if there were things he wanted us to know. He said he had seen a lot of shooting, and had seen a lot of people killed, many by friendly fire discharged in the chaos and confusion of battle. In the wake of the war, he suffered from what today would be called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and could not be around crowds or endure loud noises. “You never knew what was going on,” he said of his war experience. And that, to me, remains the enduring impression of what war is: That those doing the actual fighting do not know what’s going on

War is an Industrial Age game played by the powerful at the expense of those whose lives are on the line. We know from the tragic story of Pat Tillman in Afghanistan that those doing the actual fighting still do not know what’s going on.

All of which is why the story of Arzu Rugs caught my my attention last week on the local news in Chicago. Founded by Connie Duckworth, a former Goldman Sachs trader, Arzu imports the beautiful rugs woven by the artisans of Afghanistan. But rugmaking is only the meta layer of a game with much deeper meaning, and many other objectives.

Arzu’s work embroiders art and commercialism with social consciousness. Before they can sign a contract with Arzu, weavers are required to take courses in literacy, math, health, hygiene, nutrition and human rights. Arzu has championed women’s rights, piloted community sports programs, built catchbasins to provide villages with healthy drinking water, and given educations to the children of hundreds of Afghan families.

In the Afghan language of Daria, ‘arzu’ means hope.

In the Networked World, we have the ability to play games that are more productive than the one that truamatized my father and killed Pat Tillman. Games initiated by the powerful for the benefit of all who play them, where all the players know what’s going on. Games that out-smart our enemies instead of trying to out-kill them, that feed people instead of starving them. Games in which friendly fire means stoking the hope that burns in every parent for every child.