This first eBook in the “Metaphors for Alignment” series describes the benefits of building metaphoric maps in business settings to make complex matters “Mind-Sized”. It describes examples of culture change in manufacturing and aligning numerous country organizations to implement an international project.
The target audience for this second part of the “Metaphors for Alignment” series includes project managers, middle level managers and professionals in all fields– assuming they aspire to lead even thought they don’t have manager titles. You will learn how to improve an organization when you see a need and have the will but no power.
Third in the series “Metaphors for Alignment”, its target audience is senior executives seeking ways to effect broad scale change in their organizations. You will learn how to integrate “inspirational” and “working” metaphors into your leadership methods and gain the experience of other execs who have employed cascading workshops to engage a large number of subordinates in change programs.
This eBook shows leaders how to use metaphors and symbols to bring about change in their organizations. It includes the three eBooks listed above:
Simplify – Making Problems Mind-Sized with Metaphors. It introduces the concept of building metaphoric maps to solve problems and set strategy and provides examples of their use for international project coordination and changing culture in a manufacturing group.
Leading from the Middle – Collaboration through Metaphors. It shows how non-managers can lead in setting strategy collaboratively, without power, across organizations. It shows an example of creating a “contract” for for IT, system users and a steering committee.
Alphas Don’t Bark – Metaphors to Lead Enterprise Change. It shows how senior executives can leverage metaphors and provides examples of focusing an organization culture and implementing broad scale change by engaging a large number of subordinates in cascading workshops.
This seminal book on using metaphors for collaborative strategy setting was published in 1994. On assignment from the World Trade Organization to help Sri Lanka grow exports, Larry Raymond found that words alone were useless in aligning people to a common objective. The business leaders, educators and government officials he brought together did nothing other than declare and defend their views, over and over, louder each time with phrases such as: “If you had simply listened to me last year, we wouldn’t have a problem.”
If you ever had the task of leading change, you know the challenge! You also know that conventional solutions don’t get you all the way to a focused, motivated team. Fortunately, two hours down that road in Sri Lanka came the breakthrough idea that developed into the suite of visual, metaphoric “languages” that have since focused hundreds of workshops on building and implementing a challenging vision of the future.
Visual, Metaphor Languages are a new tool to show connections, relationships, values, obstacles, risks and strategies. They encourage building on each others’ ideas and draw out intuition and spatial thinking capabilities to display the big picture and its logic and the often hidden emotions that cause problems or can drive teams to great heights.
This 192 page Ebook, originally published by ASQC Quality Press, describes the principles that will lead you though tough communication issues to agreement on just what is wrong, how things will work when the problems are solved and objectives are met, and how to get there. Your path starts with gaining group cohesion by thinking in metaphors that make meaning clear and eliminate unnecessary arguments. Then, you go on to generating creative group solutions and the excitement of building the future together!
The metaphors described here will change your own thinking approach too! They will make it easier to size up situations, know the difference between a “crocodile” and a “duck”, and get things done in record time!