Seminar: Exploring the shifting dynamics of metaphor in organisational design conversations

Metaphor is pervasive in organisational sense-making and design conversations, often operating beneath explicit awareness. But even when we are conscious of the metaphors we use, are we sufficiently aware of the many layers of creative tension they give rise to: for example, between opening up and closing down meaning, or between individual and collective sense-making? This is not simply a question of becoming more aware of metaphor, but of attending to its relational nature.

Metaphors can make complex experience available for discussion, and they can liberate our thinking from organisational norms. But they can also constrain or prematurely settle meaning. We can become seduced by their generative qualities to the point where we no longer let them go when they have served their purpose. The role a metaphor plays can change over time. In doing so, metaphors can construct as well as represent what participants take to be reality. This raises questions for facilitators about when a metaphor has served its purpose.

Drawing on his PhD research, Chris will introduce conceptual frameworks and material offering ways to examine these tensions and consider their implications for facilitating design conversations.

The seminar will open by exploring the ways we encounter metaphor in design conversations, how metaphor has been understood and described, and the paradoxes it contains. Chris will then invite participants to experiment with metaphor themselves and explore what happens when a metaphor enters a conversation between people trying to make sense of an organisational situation.

The intention is not to provide a definitive method for "using metaphor correctly", but to open a space to explore more nuanced questions about our attentiveness when working with metaphor, both individually and collectively. What happens when metaphor enters organisational thinking: when does a generative metaphor become a constraint, and how do we know when to let it go?

Chris’s work sits at the intersection of organisational change, service design and the often-unspoken metaphors and assumptions through which we make sense of organisations.

He began his career as an information graphics designer in media organisations, later moving into broader change leadership roles within some of the UK’s largest media organisations over a 25-year career, before becoming a consultant with Thoughtworks ten years ago. Across these different contexts, a recurring question has been how we make change real in organisations where hidden forces and unspoken assumptions can pull us back towards the status quo, with metaphors often giving form to the assumptions through which we understand the world around us.

In 2018, Chris returned to academia to explore a question that had emerged from this experience: how can we intentionally design the future of work we want? Building on this question, his PhD research in service design, now close to completion, has examined the role of metaphor in shaping how we understand organisations and facilitate design conversations. His research explores how metaphors can open up new ways of seeing and imagining while simultaneously carrying assumptions that can constrain what becomes visible, thinkable or possible. This has led Chris to develop concepts, tools and frameworks for design facilitators to reflect on the metaphors present in organisational conversations, and on their own participation in creating, reinforcing or challenging those ways of seeing.

For Chris, we are all designers of organisational life, whether or not we claim the title. The future of work is therefore not a destination with a single answer, but an ongoing act of design: one that demands greater awareness of the metaphors and conceptual frames through which we imagine what is possible.