Writer: Craig Meerkamper

Analogy is easily one of my favorite tools in the writer's toolkit because it’s relatively easy to deploy -- but difficult to effectively use. It provides your audience with a recognizeable and easy way to understand everything from the organizational structure of a business to the utility of a new product. The central power of analogy is the way it turns comparisons into ‘frameworks’ that can significantly ease your audience’s comprehension when strategically applied.

The barrier to entry when using analogies is so low that most people end up unintentionally using them every day without even realizing it. This article is riddled with a bunch that I didn’t even mean to put into it, they’re just that integral to the English language.  

Here’s a very familiar example: 

We talk about housing markets as “a bubble ready to burst”. Housing markets are really complex. They have so many variables, it’s almost impossible to describe them to the public without an analogy. A framework that can be visualized makes this much easier. The bubble is clear and simple. The notion of it bursting is quite powerful too. We see the bubble getting bigger. We know it can’t continue forever, but we don’t know exactly when it will pop. We can only sense it’s about to happen. 

Analogy is not the same as Metaphor and Simile, but they are often used together. Metaphor is calling one thing something else entirely. Think “my math teacher is the devil”, sorry to all the math teachers reading this but today you are my scapegoat (oh look a metaphor!). Simile is the next step up; think “my math teacher is like the devil”. Simile recognizes a single comparison, letting readers draw their own assumptions of exactly how the teacher is comparable to the devil. Maybe they’re a tyrant who rules their domain and enjoys inflicting torment through brutally difficult tests. I for one would assume a math teacher is like the devil because they both enjoy ‘sin’ (that joke's an apology to all the math teachers because only you guys will get it).  

Analogy takes a like-comparison and runs with it, exploring its limits by demonstrating a number of similarities. Take a mental note when you feel this following analogy stops working for you and you’ll get what I mean.  

Although analogy is the most powerful of the three tools, using it is a lot like running with scissors. It's flashy, attention grabbing, and can quickly turn into a bad idea if you don’t know when to slow down and question your choices. You need to make sure it’s the right pair of scissors to run with for your intended purpose. Running with a bad pair of scissors means that the longer you try to force them to meet your needs the more likely you are to misapply them. You might want to continue running with the scissors because you’ve already committed this far. So, you double down and now you’re running with two pairs of scissors at the same time, which is twice as dangerous, and (at around this point) the analogous comparison has gone far past credulity and entered the world of the absurd. 

As a thought experiment, there is a lot of potential value in getting to that absurdist point because depending on the two elements of the analogy, it may take a shockingly long time to get through all the appropriately correlative comparisons. A comparison with a high level of parallel elements can mean the analogy is actually quite strong. Pushing past that point to increasingly tenuous comparisons (i.e. airplanes are like monarch butterflies because they have wings, migrate to Florida every winter by the thousands, and are interested in... flowers?) enters the territory of ‘forcing’ an analogy when you begin assuming that every element of framework must cleanly correlate with something you’re trying to describe. However, doing this exercise can help you to consider your problems in a nonconventional way and even help reframe them.  

On the other hand, forcing an analogy can make you overconfident in your understanding of your problem and can cause you to make ill-informed decisions. A good analogy should help you think outside of the box, instead of just providing you another box to graft your problem/idea onto. You might feel that your business compares well to how a pirate ship is run with its ruthless Captain, First Mate, and keeping all of its treasure hidden in the Caymen Islands, but if you force the analogy and try to literally run it like a ship by barking captain’s orders to your crew and throwing the dissenters overboard you’re going to end up with a mutiny on your hands. 

Entire industries use analogy to make themselves sound less intimidating and more comprehensible to newcomers. If you try to explain to me how blockchain technology is a distributed ledger system within a decentralized network of users, my eyes will glaze over. However, we can understand why it became popular to discuss cryptocurrency as “digital gold” that you “mine” and keep in a “wallet”. A similar thing is happening in the AI space where we describe the “training” process of large language models like that of a pet where they are given digital “treats/rewards” and “punishments” based on their outputs to get them closer to desired behaviors. Simple, visual concepts that we’re all familiar with make the new and obtuse more approachable. 

When it comes to your own use of analogy in the workspace consider a complex problem you’re currently facing and the ways analogy can help you provide an approachable framework to explain the situation. Say a member of staff is making a workspace intolerable because they are disruptive and insert themselves into projects or discussions where they aren’t needed. Or an investor would be interested in supporting your project but isn’t convinced of its feasibility without a test or prototype. Draw out a diagram of the parties involved and their relationships before asking yourself if there’s power dynamics at play, emotional factors, functional relationships, procedural stages, and anything else that defines how these elements relate to each other.  

Is your problem like a boardgame, a sporting team, a Greek myth, a movie, an illness? Inspiration for the appropriate analogy can come from anywhere, but when you’ve found one that seems to have a high level of parallels, begin mapping your problem onto that framework while highlighting the points it’s different. These differences are crucial to personalizing your deployment of the framework and explaining the problem to others. If there’s a “rock in your shoe”, then would it be better if the “rock” was “smoothed out” or just “removed” entirely? If the “team is resentful of a star player” getting the most “field time”, then could you “increase the frequency you rotate the bench?”  

Analogies don’t usually produce hard answers or decisive recommendations, but they assist you in focusing on the questions you should ask to effectively tackle your problems and communicate your proposed solutions. Real problems are never as simple or easily addressed as we would like them to be, but a solution can often become more obvious with a bit of strategic reframing. Like a hot knife through butter, you’ll be cutting through your problems and clarifying confusion before you know it.