Imaging as a leadership competency

Excerpt from:

The leader’s edge: Six creative competencies for navigating complex challenges

Charles J. Palus
David Magellan Horth
Jossey-Bass 2002

Chapter 3: Imaging

The world is amidst an image revolution. Pictures, stories, metaphors, and visual arts animate the language of the New Economy. The palette of communication options and more importantly, of idea making, is expanding enormously, transforming the way people think. For today’s creative leadership a new kind of literacy is required: a literacy of images.

“Straight talk” and literal thinking—as valuable as they are—often prove inadequate when addressing complex challenges. Knowledge does not always translate neatly into sentences. Words can fail us by their clumsiness or by what they leave out. The creative leadership competency we call imaging offers a way to go beyond the limits of language.

Imaging is the ability to make sense of information, construct ideas, and communicate effectively through the use of images. Images run the
gamut from pictures to poetry, including envisioned scenarios of the future, objects that model ideas, sketching by hand, video, and digital graphics. Novelist James Dickey tells us that the task of imaging is poetic in nature, to "pick up all this crippled shrillness of words and throw it with both hands toward the light."

Imaging plays a vital role in collaborative innovation. It makes thought visible by creating and sharing images within communities.¹ We believe that creative forms of leadership make imagination shared property by placing images into the middle of conversations, where they can become the clay for building creative solutions to complex challenges.

Imaging plays a critical role in our individual learning process as well. Master educator Bernice McCarthy warns that people often skip imaging during learning, much to their detriment. According to McCarthy, people process and internalize new information optimally through a specific learning cycle. The learning cycle also explains how people optimally approach complex challenges. It begins like this: connect, reflect, image, conceptualize.

Connection happens through paying attention and personalizing. Reflection is logical analysis about the connection that we have just made—a bit of stepping back to organize the raw initial perceptions and experiences. Imaging expresses these reflections in terms of rich pictures, as a prelude to the conceptualization of the complex challenge in formal and more precise ways. If we jump directly from reflection to conceptualization (both L-mode processes), we eliminate both imagination and creativity. Imaging, then, is a vital step to gathering R-mode information.

Imaging structured on both sides by analysis is an extremely powerful engine for facing complexity. In this chapter we offer several imaging techniques and approaches that have proven effective in addressing complex challenges. They are:

• Tangible imagination
• Organizational vision
• Exploring scenarios
• Making and using metaphors
• Poetry in the face of complexity
  

Tangible Imagination

Imagination is the manipulation of images … Human reason discovers new relations between things not by deduction, but by that unpredictable blend of speculation and insight that scientists call induction, which—like other forms of imagination—cannot be formalized. —Jacob Bronowski ³

Imagination is a way of moving things around so they take new shapes, paying attention to the images we construct and constructing with the images we perceive. Making imagination tangible allows these thoughts to be pursued in groups rather than as a wholly solitary activity. We make imagination tangible by using tools such as pencil and paper, computer graphics, architecture, games, and toys to describe our visions.

Computer software offers many ways to manipulate images for the purpose of turning data into knowledge and wisdom. The recent history of computing chronicles the replacement of pure number-crunching with inviting visual interfaces that offer new ways to perceive meaning. Jean Gassee, former European Director of Apple Computers, suggests in his book The Third Apple that this was a necessary step in the evolution of computers as scaffolds for the imagination.

VisiCalc was quickly supplemented with another program called Visiplot. And now we have Multiplan and Chart and integrated programs such as Excel and Jazz. Their original feature was to translate arrays of numbers into graphs and pictures with reliefs, colors, and perspectives. These pictures create meaning, they tell a story, they have a power of expression infinitely superior to any table of figures.

But computers by themselves fall short of the full potential of competent imaging. They are simply tools, after all. The key to making them useful is the human innovation and interpretation behind the graphs and grids and pie charts. Let’s look at ways to make imaging more friendly to imagination: collage and star mapping.

Collage

Collage is a technique invented by artists in the early 20^th century that combines diverse images or artifacts to construct new meanings. It is now widely used to create composite ideas for various mediums, such as advertising and the Internet. The word collage comes from French; it invokes the root meanings “collision of ideas” and “illicit love affair.” It is also related to ecology, the interrelationship of organisms and their environments. Collage is an excellent tool for assisting people in crafting new ideas together, for creating and responding to a broader ecology of knowledge.

Meena K. is the Director of a Medical Therapeutic Unit struggling with challenges that include HMO conditions, changing demographics, and new treatment models. At first, her staff was dispirited and unclear as to their direction. She helped them find meaning and direction by “going visual”:

The people here have the heart for this work. They are able to do it. They just didn't know what the vision of the work was…. So we went visual with the staff. We started creating visuals around the office about what we thought the work was, and what the new work would look like. And what some people were already actually doing. A marketing person started taking pictures of people working with clients in different ways and we [mounted] those pictures all over the office. We created a collage in the back, in the staff office. We created a whole wall-sized picture about the work…. Now they’re seeing possibilities. There seems to be a spirit.

Collage images can come from a variety of places and build on one another. The “colliding images” might be externally oriented, or from a personal perspective. Collage can combine emotional and intuitive information with harder forms of data. Collage can be used as a barometer or a compass. Ray is a manager in the software industry who has used collage to take the pulse of his staff as a starting point for problem solving:

My staff and I have had a very busy year, dealing with the usual corporate issues, such as insufficient resources and a burgeoning workload. I sensed much frustration and impatience among my department managers. To give voice to some of that and direct them toward positive attitudes, I asked my direct reports to bring to a staff meeting a couple of pictures illustrating how they currently feel about their jobs and another couple of pictures illustrating how they would like to feel.

Then I asked each person to combine their pictures into a larger composition. The results amazed me. Everyone—even the no-nonsense, analytical system support manager—put together very honest collages. I asked them to interpret their own collages as well as suggest interpretations for the others in the room. The exercise allowed them a safe way to open to their peers, who were quite supportive. The sharing of frustrations and hopes served as a springboard for a discussion of the realities of our workplace and ways to achieve some of our desired changes.

Making a Pictorial Language

The Orion Research Center (ORC) offers a rich, many-layered example of how tangible imagination can be used for collaborative strategic planning. ORC is the central corporate research-and-development laboratory of a $2B consumer products company, Orion Inc., that specializes in advanced office products. Orion’s intent has always been to invent rather than copy.

Ten years ago ORC was rigidly hierarchical. Decisions flowed from the top and “strategy” meant merely the selection of projects. The senior executives would gather annually to determine the work of the division and what got funded. This approach began losing effectiveness. By the early 1990s there was a crisis: ORC was slipping behind the competition in its ability to develop new products for changing markets. ORC, however, did have a vision:

What the technical world will experience and value: The ultimate high-output, learning-networked community of individuals.

What the business world will see and value First to commercialize innovative products, processes, and services with measurably higher value for customers throughout the world.

What ORC needed was to foster the creative abilities necessary to implement this vision.

When we met them, ORC was already “going visual” as an organization. For example, in addition to having a vision expressed in words, they made drawings of this vision and distributed them internally. (See Figure 3.) ORC felt these drawings were necessary because the 100 or so professionals working in the Center spoke 30 different language dialects. English was not everyone’s first language and thus not a common denominator by which to convey ORC’s complex ideas. ORC warned us, “You won’t know the meaning of the whole thing as we show you our picture—but everything in this picture has a significant meaning in the organization.” They were on to the powerful idea that pictures can help foster dialogue, which cuts across ethnic diversity.

Drawn illustrations can be used in a variety of similar ways to cut across blocks in communications, to span distances, and to work out ideas under time pressure. Albert S., an engineering group director we worked with, was on the phone coordinating with a several of his team. The team was gathering at the airport before rushing off to an emergency meeting in Scotland with their Vice President—and all were having much trouble getting their key message in order. Albert said “Sit down and make a drawing of your main message and fax it to me.” They did, and it cut through the noise and got them all on the same page. The next iteration of the drawing, made on the flight, won the day in Scotland by focusing attention around a shared and compelling image.

As one might expect, ORC handles a lot of patents. When the velocity and complexity of that critical work at ORC increased, their patent specialist devised visual methods for tracking and communicating about patent projects. His robust system has put him light years ahead of his colleagues:

I used to have a credenza in the back where the patent paperwork was stacked up. I took the credenza out and made my wall a series of charts. We have charts where you’re measuring or recording your metrics for cost, quality, and service for patent management. …I’m using pencils and things like that and coloring them in. It’s basically creating art on the wall, but that has meaning and value to the corporation. I call that business art. So my whole wall is just—I guess about 12, maybe 11’ by 8’ wide—is just filled with charts and color. It’s very visual. Then we overlay polyacetate over that to aid in removability of the labels, next we cut the surface of the chart itself, and then we apply to that the removable labels, and move the projects around as they progress through the commercialization pathway.

A patent attorney called with a question and after scanning my charts I immediately said, “We have something coming up in three months time.” But his department can’t get the information to him very fast. He’s got to go through a database and do a search string, and say, “What’s due in 2001?” then type star, search, and then go through each record.

In some cases it works to use a skilled artist like ORC did in working up their group vision—but it is imperative that the process be interactive such that it is in fact you that is producing the drawing. All the better if you can sketch it yourself. Immediacy and authenticity win out over gloss. One executive worked out a series of color drawings about strategy, which he creates from scratch on chart paper each time he does a presentation. He tells us he achieves a rapport in this fashion that he never experienced with his usual PowerPoint show. It also keeps him fresh and present—the drawings change somewhat in connection with each audience—during what has become a repetitive task.

Star-Mapping

We worked specifically with ORC’s Strategic Planning Team, led by Richard Irons, Director of Research. In response to the increasing pace and quality of innovation in their market, ORC began doing strategic planning with a 20-person team of managers, scientists, and technologists. The purpose was to read the waters of market and technological change more deliberately and to make better decisions. The team was selected for diverse experience and perspectives and for leadership potential. It had open access to relevant information on internal operations, technology, patents, customers, and competitors.

The team grew very sophisticated at processing all this data, and by most measures their efforts were increasingly successful—but they ran into a wall. Computer-aided techniques of analysis went far but proved inadequate. There was simply too much information and too many unknowns to take in and to solve for. The team members were frustrated because they thought they could make better use of all this data, but were unable to see a way to do that. The team also knew there was more in the information in front of them than they could articulate, or even notice. They felt opportunity escaping because they just couldn’t get their arms around everything going on. Something was missing.

One analytical technique the team used was to “spider diagram” each proposed project. Spider diagrams, created from Excel spreadsheets, plot ratings of each project by criteria for each “leg” of the spider. The adjacent rating points on the spider legs are then connected with a straight line and the resultant polygon is cut out with scissors.

While examining spider diagrams, the team made a key innovation. They turned the diagrams over so that no numbers or data points were visible—only the overall shapes of the diagrams. They marked the top of each project shape, so that the projects could be compared to each other. The team played with arranging and sorting the shapes, and began calling them “star maps.”

The star maps strongly engage visual perception. Team members try to make sense of the patterns they notice. They ask themselves what is missing from an ideal pattern. They exercise their intuition instead of constantly focusing on the numbers. They conduct various exercises in which they collaborate in pushing the shapes into clusters along a variety of dimensions. The language shifts from one focused on numbers, logical analysis, and ranking of criteria to one concerned with shape, form, and appropriateness.

According to one of the groups leaders,

Before, we basically had to memorize, or constantly flip through pages and pages of information. There are about 60 different candidate projects, and you had to memorize the same attributes off of a piece of paper. And people could not remember. If we had a discussion on a particular area of technology one week, if we had a meeting the next week on the next theory of technology, by the time you tried to synthesize it all together, people could not remember all the information that was conveyed to them without having to flip through pages and pages of information. With this new visualization technique, it was interactive, it was collaborative, it helped facilitate the meeting, and it helped clarify the strengths and weaknesses of the projects.

Star mapping has provided the team with several key benefits for their strategic planning:

Supplementing Formal Analysis with Pattern-Finding. ORC had previously identified attunement to patterns and trends as a main weakness in their planning process. Star-mapping enables team members to better see patterns and make sense of them. With star-mapping, their analytical language shifts from one focused on numbers, logical analysis, and ranking of criteria to one concerned with shape, form, and appropriateness.

You can stand back and look at the pattern [of all the star maps laid out in a grid]. And you go, "It doesn't look right." Then you can take a closer look in and say, "There's something wrong with that particular star map." And you take a look at an even closer level at what the attributes are, where the weaknesses are, where the strengths are, and how somebody mischaracterized those strengths and weaknesses. And only then do you take a look at the project name.

Legitimizing Intuition. As technologists and scientists, this group clearly has considerable intuitive power; however, the business organization tended to distrust and severely discount intuition. Star-mapping provides a structure that supports intuition but buffers its limitations. Because the star-maps emerge from specific data, the process contains inherent checks and balances.

In the past we would just go with what the numbers told us. Now people are more comfortable saying, “It just doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t look right. We’re missing something.” Maybe our numerical criteria is missing something, and there’s this project over here that, even though the numbers don’t look right, my gut tells me that we need to be working this area. That [approach] has surfaced a number of projects that probably wouldn’t have gotten looked at otherwise.

Fostering Open Dialogue and Teamwork. By temporarily elevating intuition over critical analysis, star-mapping created a more level playing field. Quieter voices—often those who spoke English as a second language—had more of a chance to contribute. Says one member, “An individual would take a star map and lay it down next to others. Someone else would say, ‘Oh, the position is in wrong order.’ And they’ll flip them around, and then someone else might say, ‘No, we think it’s the other way.’ It created a dialogue.” Says another member:

I think we tapped into some natural areas of competency of the quieter people and that brought them out of their shells. “More visual” is associated with empowerment somehow. The method of looking at and handling shapes has been very empowering because it gives everyone a hands-on approach, and equal footing at the table. There’s less hesitation of some of the people lower on the ladder to raise their hand and say, “This doesn’t feel right to me.”

Bringing Negative Space into Strategic Direction. Star-mapping illuminates negative spaces among the projects with respect to overall strategy. ORC members began asking: What do the spaces between the projects look like and what do they imply? What are we not addressing? What’s missing from the pattern?

Then we said, “Is there anything wrong with this picture?” We stood back and looked at it as a group. “What is different, what is new, what’s exciting, what shouldn’t be here, what should be there, where’s the gap?”

Using the Hand to Train the Eye. Kinesthetic attention is a component of the star-mapping process. Not only do people produce the images and look at them, but also they move them, push them sideways, and turn them upside-down. People actually grasp star-maps—they must hold them as well as intellectually grasp them—and that helps them to grasp the patterns created by the star-maps as well. Sometimes members of the ORC team would fight about how they were moving the stars around the paper. Literally rubbing shoulders and literally pushing ideas (projects) around seems to facilitate resolution of conflict and promote community building.

An astronomer once told me that he learned to see more by drawing what he saw through his scope. The lesson as he summarized it pertains here as well as to looking at any complex pattern: “The hand trains the eye.” When you draw, or build a collage, or put something in the middle as part of mediated dialogue—where you’re actually handling this something in the middle—the eye-hand connection helps you to pay attention and to image better. Our abilities to pay attention, construct, and re-construct images are deeply rooted in not just the brain but in the whole body.

Increasing the Velocity of Innovation. ORC is getting more and better products to market in less time, as measured by the standards of their innovation process, in part because of star-mapping and the wider distribution of strategic leadership among their knowledge workers. Star-mapping has given them confidence to quickly make decisions that they previously would have agonized over. It has also given them confidence to stretch outside their usual conservatism in search of new projects.

The overall result for ORC in their push to see and respond to patterns more rapidly collaboratively: Their product R&D cycle has been reduced from five years to less than two and a half years. The value of completed projects has increased significantly. Low-value projects are identified and terminated earlier. And, there has been substantial improvement in their climate for creativity work (as measured by the KEYS™ climate survey).

Organizational Vision In A New Light

As more people participate in the process of leadership, it is helpful to realize that there is more than one kind of organizational vision. We find three different types of vision: abstract, direct, and imaginative.

Abstract vision tends to be the most commonplace, employed by managers and usually expressed numerically in bullet points, such as “Next year we will grow by 20 percent” or “We will be first or second in our market or leave.” The concrete appearance of these phrases is largely an illusion, since the numbers describe nothing you can experience directly. Numerical abstractions (important though they may be) can easily fail to capture the passion and imagination of the organization, the vision of “Why are we here? What are we doing this for in the first place?”

Direct vision and imaginative vision are most relevant when you face complex challenges, as well as when you share leadership widely within the organization. The word vision means literally “with the eyes.” Direct vision refers to paying careful attention to what is really in front of you, watching with discernment where you are and where you are going. Organizational learning expert Fred Kofman calls this the shared horizon: what people working together see when they look up from their work. Direct vision examines the essence of the organization—its identity and culture, its values and principles. A clear vision of the present includes a picture where you stand, of velocity and direction, of the current trajectory of where you are headed.

Imaginative vision takes up where direct vision leaves off. It asks “what if?” and explores possibilities by creating images of what has not yet happened. Imaginative vision also inspires people toward a common goal. With imagination, we flesh out our inspiration so that it becomes tangible, compelling, and real. In this way, we sustain our passion and reinforce the belief that our inspiration can become reality.

Here is a pharmacy director talking about combining direct and imaginative vision to remodel his business:

I had a vision of the pharmacy all the time of how I wanted it to be and how I wanted it to work—but I never put it to paper and I never discussed edges and proportions and relationships. But that's what I had done in trying to frame and move and adjust and create this picture that I always knew existed. … I've always been able to do that in other areas. We go to movies and I'd say to my wife, "I enjoyed that but I would have done this." You know, then it's just another expression of the artist in me. It’s been enlightening to realize that I can be an artist in business.

Most managers crave exactness. For them, control means precise alignment. You could say that freight trains are well-aligned; they get where they are going quickly and efficiently. You could also say they have tunnel vision. As a leader, you can use tunnel vision when you know precisely where you are going and if you have the engine, the tracks, and the cars to get there. (It also helps a lot if all the signals are working, and if other trains stay off your tracks.) But images and visions in this broader sense naturally have multiple interpretations. That’s precisely what makes images helpful in addressing complexity. Images are polysemous, that is, they lend themselves to multiple meanings. Images have layers of meaning that depend on unfolding circumstances. Polysemous images are a wonderful antidote to tunnel vision. When two people look at a complex image they most likely see different things—which most likely doesn’t surprise them. As a result, they can talk about the differences and similarities in what they see.

Likewise, events in organizations are polysemous, having many possible meanings. Managers are taught to use language to render gray areas into black and white. Organizations develop jargon, striving for language that is singular in meaning for the workforce. While managers habitually work to pin meanings down, creative leaders realize that in a complex world meaning is elusive, and that the existence of multiple understandings is potentially adaptive The artistry of creative leadership lies in the differentiation and synthesis of multiple understandings as part of a larger vision.

When you regard “organizational vision” as imaging combined with careful attention to what is in front of our eyes, combined with abstract language necessary for business communication, then creative leadership blooms. Put images in front of the people in your organization, put them in their hands where they can move them around—and watch how they transform the images and their meanings in adaptive ways.

A masterful description of vision at work can be found in Marjorie Parker’s book Creating Shared Vision. Parker describes how the CEO of an aluminum company led his company to the creation of a vivid pictorial representation of the organization, its major functions, and the work of everybody in it. The picture, and more importantly the process of creating the picture, enabled the organization to literally create a work of art that embodied meaning for the whole organization. With Parker’s help, the CEO his senior team envisioned the organization as a country garden—not a typical metaphor for an industrial organization, but one that conveyed the radical nature of the changes envisioned. With the help of a visual artist he communicated an incomplete image of the garden to the whole of the organization, which through a series of workshops completed the picture so that every employee owned every detail of the picture. Employees were thus passionately engaged in the ongoing mission of the organization.

Exploring Scenarios

Scenarios are possible futures that we deliberately explore. Used by organizations to navigate through complexity toward a preferred future, scenarios are an increasingly common leadership tool.⁴ We recommend an imaging technique for exploring future scenarios that we call movie-making. The “movie” made is a wall-sized collage of images and words that tell an imaginative story about where an organization might be headed, or how certain challenges might worsen or resolve “once upon a time in a place not too distant from here.” Movie-making produces searching dialogue in a group faced with a complex challenge.

Typically when we work with a group, one or several themes in their challenge become apparent over the course of our discussions. For a movie-making exercise, we lay out the themes, split the group into sections of 4-8 people, and give them a theme (or have them select one) around which to make their movie.

Movie-Making Exercise

Goal: A movie is fiction with a lot of truth in it. Think of making your movie as building “an imaginary pond with real frogs”: Your movie should explore your theme in a creative way (the “imaginary pond”), so that it can become a basis for a genuine reality-based dialogue (the “real frogs”).

Materials:

Butcher paper for each group (3 meters long)

Scissors

Magazines

Pens, pencils, paints

Directions:

Combine words and images on a roll of white paper to create a “movie.” Use words and illustrated narrative sequences, moving from left to right.

Your movie should have three parts to the plot: “Once upon a time, there was an organization something like us … Then one day something happened, a catastrophe, an invention, a revolution, or … And so this is how it all turned out, for better or worse.”

Be sure to listen to the “quiet” voices. At some point have the “big” voices take a turn being quiet.

Show the movie to the rest of the group. Use it as a springboard for dialogue exploring your theme.

Tips:

Use twice as much white paper as you think you will need—doublewide, 3 meters long.

If you get stuck creating a plot, just start arranging images on the roll of paper. Play with the visual ideas and explain it later.

If you become stuck or encounter conflict between two or more of you as you wrestle with the content of the movie, invent characters to represent the protagonists and put them in the movie. Let the characters work out your conflict.

Encourage the group to be inventive about the catastrophe, however unlikely this aspect of the scenario.

In debriefing the movie, ensure that the period from “and then one day…” is explored carefully so the movie doesn’t simply jump from the stuck point to “…and they all lived happily ever after.” Ask: What practical, new processes and events occurred that contributed to our progress from being stuck to finding a meaningful outcome?

Robin W., a VP of software development, explains how she used movie-making with a large, diverse group of people:

I used movie making to explore a critical issue facing our division. All the attendees at the meeting are leaders of functional groups. Some are my direct reports; the rest are supervisors who report to my direct reports. I created two groups of four each…. We covered the walls with big, white rolls of paper. I also provided images from magazines, markers, ribbon, glue sticks, stickers, string, and other craft stuff. I instructed them to work fast and make their movies "as provocative as hell." And they did!

One group created a "movie" that went something like this: Once upon a time there are four friends who work at a computer software company which looks like … this … then one day, December 31, 1999 to be exact, they commit the perfect crime. They break into the company directory and payroll system and change all the employee titles and salaries. Boss becomes Subordinate, and all Subordinates become Bosses. This creates an interesting series of situations … in which everyone sees issues and problems from a totally different perspective, and they are better able to solve problems because of these new perspectives. The closing frame is the words "Live the Dream."

This movie stimulated a powerful dialogue for us on these points:

The need to see issues from more than one perspective;

The importance of acknowledging the perspective of corporate management;

The importance of acknowledging our clients' needs;

The importance of acknowledging our staffs' needs and balancing them with what our clients need;

The need to "shield" our clients from our internal problems and issues;

The need to help staff see their clients' perspectives;

The need to improve communication of needs and expectations.

Movies need not be about probable events. In fact, we find that the process works best when the group is instructed to build the plot around something “unexpected or even catastrophic.” These days it is probable that something unexpected will happen.

When making movies within organizations, keep a few things to keep in mind.

Group Hesitancy. Before the process begins people might be concerned that movie-making will be too “touchy-feely.” These concerns almost always fade during the dialogue, as real business issues get explored in depth and detail. In fact, increased “touch” and “feel” about complex issues are a key objective of the exercise.

Opposition Within a Group. Having something in the middle of the group—the movies—allows opposing ideas a common focus. The dialogue that follows the making of the movies is the real point of this exercise. The movie medium encourages discussion to wander away from the issues to revisit them refreshed. If groups experience conflict as they make the movie, suggest they craft their conflict into opposing characters, put them into the movie, and see how it comes out.

Analytical Overdrive. When groups start designing movies, their conversation often begins abstract and analytical. You can facilitate their imaging process by encouraging them to “go up to the wall and start sketching out your ideas.” At the wall, people usually becomes more intuitive, imaginative, and playful.

Valuable Metaphors. Metaphors created in these movies usually contain insights about the actual state of the organization, where it is headed, and the means to get there. Your group can take away these metaphors and use them to craft and communicate your mission, vision, values, and so forth.

Unpolished Drafts. Keep in mind that movies are more like unpolished drafts than finished scripts. They tend to be non-linear and less integrated than a traditional story. These qualities are actually helpful to the ensuing dialogue since they invite revision and further “what ifs.” Practice in rough-drafting and exploring visions is good leadership practice.

Making and Using Metaphors

Metaphor is the technique of explaining one thing in terms of another, and it is a superb way of creating new ideas and understandings. Metaphor uses likeness as a gateway to the unknown. The word metaphor comes from the Greek and means "carrying across." In the city of Athens, Greece, one sees the label METAΦOPA (metaphora) on hand carts and delivery trucks.⁵ Metaphors are the carts and trucks of meaning for the mind at work.

Most people use metaphor quite casually, neglecting the rich power of this device. But metaphors are a fundamental means by which we make sense of the world. For example, biologists talk of the grammar of genetic code. Engineers study fatigue in metals. Units of measure— foot, hand, yard, and stone —originated from universal comparisons that all merchants and artisans could gauge.

One powerful metaphor was invented when the paper-and-pencil spreadsheet was carried across as a computer interface on the original Apple Macintosh personal computers. The “spreadsheet” was a new way for novices to navigate effectively in computing space. According to Steven Levy in his book Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything:

When this power was extended on the Macintosh, the stage was set for a generalized rethinking of our relationship to information. The use of metaphor was so effective that, at some point, it was no longer clear where metaphor ended and reality began.⁶

Human beings are relentless borrowers of patterns, and the way in which thought, understanding, and action are linked is metaphorical in nature.⁷ Change expert Gareth Morgan has observed that beneficial metaphors can be identified and propagated. He offers this model for organizational change:

metaphoric thinking to new understanding to creative action

Morgan calls metaphor the genetic code of an organization: a compelling image for “who and what we are” will replicate widely, inspire people to act upon it or achieve it, and thus become self-fulfilling. Hewlett Packard has embraced the metaphor of genetic code quite literally, recently summarizing their core principles and disseminating them internally under the moniker of “our HP DNA.”

Metaphors as Invitations. Metaphors themselves aren’t solutions to problems; rather, they are invitations to explore new situations with fresh perceptions.⁸ Because they are often ambiguous, they enable each person that interacts with them to create her own images. Sports metaphors, for example, are often effective because many people can relate to them from personal experience. But leadership often calls for something like orchestration—a less widely experienced metaphor. We have recently spent time with Roger Nierenberg, conductor emeritus of the Jacksonville Symphony. Roger helps organizations develop a compelling metaphor of an orchestra to describe and reconcile organizational complexities. He sits the management team amidst a live orchestra—with orchestra members who have never worked before with Roger—and plays out various functional and dysfunctional situations described by the business executives. Everyone participates by listening, responding, playing or taking a turn at conducting. The situations come alive through music at its most beautiful and most cacophonous. All those involved readily carry both the metaphor and its lessons back into the organization.⁹

To develop competency with metaphor, be aware that what you are building is a scaffolding of interpretation. An historic reason for suspicion about metaphor is what the psychologist Miller Mair called the "tyranny of metaphors"—when the scaffold is mistaken for literal truth.¹⁰ For example, the useful metaphor of the machine has unfortunately led many to believe that many things literally are machines including organizations, nature, and the human mind.

Culturally, metaphors have cycles of influence. Some rise while others fade. In one organization David belonged to, the Vice President of Marketing turned up for a presentation to his staff dressed to kill, literally. In his Rambo costume, with machine gun and belts of ammunition crossing his chest, he declared, “This is war.” David recalls thinking, “That’s not why I come to work. This has no meaning for me. He’s more likely to shoot one of us than any of the competition.” The sports and war metaphors that have dominated western business until now are wearing thin. In recent years, cultural metaphors are more likely to invoke webs (the internet), ecologies (Amazon) or play spaces (Nickelodeon, Sony).

Ask yourself, ask your people, and inquire of your context: What is the next metaphor? What new invitation will help us explore the next steps in facing our complex challenges? What metaphors have worn thin?

Metaphors in Practice. Metaphors can be used internally and externally. Internally, leaders can employ metaphors to disseminate ideas, inspire passion and creativity, solve problems, and invite collaboration. Externally, metaphors can be used to disseminate brand identity, sell product, and build relationships with customers.

Donna G. used a metaphor to help her cross-functional team think about the problems Chemstar faced. To overcome quality problems, their R&D lab had been focused on inventing new chemicals. This strategy sprang from their founding pattern of inventing radically new technology. But the team had a breakthrough with this insight: “In our culture we keep wanting to invent something new as a way out of our problems. That often has been successful. But that approach leaves us with too many new formulations with their own problems. We need to learn how to tend what we already have experience with—our garden.”

Donna and the team came to view their work as a garden in which they grew many useful plants—a metaphor for what they manufactured. If a gardener has a problem in his garden, he doesn't replace the plants with all new ones. Rather, he looks long and hard at what already is growing and goes from there. Through this metaphor, the Chemstar team reconsidered their plan to invent a new line as a way out their problem. This decision, in turn, legitimized the people on the team who had wanted to leverage existing technology rather than invent something new. Yet another breakthrough came when they overhauled their product cycle; again, bypassing the lure of their classic “lets invent something new” fix. The garden metaphor offered a way for the team to think about a dimension of the problem, and to make that dimension perceptible.

Richard Zaltman at the Harvard Business School has developed a novel use of metaphor for marketing professionals, what he calls The Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET).¹¹ Zaltman makes the point that thoughts travel as images. The ZMET technique employs images to get at consumers underlying relationship with products. Product marketers help consumers describe their experiences with a product by having them cut pictures out of magazines that represent their intuitions, thoughts, and feelings about the product. Groups of subjects are invited to the lab to speak about the product by using the images. The conversations are highly metaphoric and incredibly revealing; they illuminate associations that would otherwise lie far beneath the surface.

The sanitized language we use in business masks the richness of our deeper knowledge. Our reasoning about something always mingles with emotions and hands-on experience. Thus it is no surprise that words often fail us. Treating metaphor as if it were merely a decoration for language is a mistake. In the next section we look at poetry in a functional way—not as lines on a page but as vehicle for metaphoric thought.

Poetry In The Face Of Complexity

When we speak of poetry, we mean it in a much broader sense than literary verse. A poetic frame of mind is invoked whenever we consciously use metaphors to make sense of experience. Poetry, said author Harry Emerson Fosdick, is “a profound matter briefly stated.” Poet David Whyte asserts: “Poetry is not about the experience, it is the experience.”¹²

As Whyte suggests, there is a profound difference between an event, which can be described in literal terms, and an experience, a kind of drama for which merely literal thinking is never fully adequate. Wall Street investment banker and published poet John Barr believes that “business and poetry are organizing activities that are carried out by the self in response to a chaotic world.”¹³

The Intersection of Poetry and Creative Leadership. As an element of creative leadership, poetry lies at the juncture of language and the C2 Competencies. Leaders today are expected to be brief yet inspiring, profound, and precise in their public speech. Poetry can provide both the precision and profundity that leaders today seek. Poetry offers a kind of communication that speaks to peoples’ heads, hearts, and imaginations.

President John F. Kennedy in a speech a month before his death described the value of poetry. Kennedy’s poetic sensibility made him a more able critic of the words and images put forth by others. His words are a reminder that poetic sensibility guides strong, effective, and just leaders.

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness of diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses, for art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.¹⁴

Val Smith, former VP of marketing in the computer industry and now a strategy consultant, has found an area of competence for herself at the intersection of strategic planning and poetry. Val has connected her vocation (business) with her avocation (literary poetry), to become a creative leader:

I now call myself a poet. But first it was a hobby, then I made it an interest, and then I said, ‘No. I know that the essence of who I am is a poet.’ I’ve started to realize how being a poet makes me a stronger business person. Before, I used to separate them. I believe the reason I am so strong at making connections, particularly between disparate things, is because I'm a poet. When approaching a business problem, in general I'm not going to see it vertically or linearly, I'm going to see it much more horizontally and holistically; I'm going to connect the dots more quickly. Being a poet means that I play. I play with ideas. I play with words. I juxtapose things. That's what we do when thinking strategy. You have to bring people with you—and to do that you have to paint them a picture.

Using Poetry as a Tool. Poetry has developed a unique home and performs an unusual role at the John’s River Station, a coal-fired power plant. The engineering managers learned about the Japanese form of poetry, haiku, from us and they shared it with others at the station. Traditional haiku is a three-line poem with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the last. Haiku caught on quickly at John’s River Station, especially during the highly stressful “outages” when the plant shuts down for round-the-clock maintenance and trouble-shooting. Station workers have always kept a maintenance log. Now they keep a parallel log for haiku.

An unplanned outage can happen anytime. But one is planned for maintenance every year at about this time. There’s a lot of work to be done and we are stretched very thin. When you’re doing technical work you have to keep a logbook going. You record events to help people because the next shift’s got to take it over from there. If you’re in the plant and there’s been some weird thing happening you’ve got to pass the log on to somebody so they can continue the work. Now we keep a book of haiku where each of us shares our struggles during these high stress situations.

Workers write the haiku for themselves and for each other. They capture the essence when “there’s been some weird thing happening” and pass on this essence to the next shift. At a calmer moment we witnessed the team using this haiku collection to recall stories of past events from which they had individually or collected learned. As we sat around a lunch table, workers read their poetry and laughed, remembering the experiences in minute detail, with obvious affection for each other and the memories—and acknowledgement of the pain they had all suffered.

The engineers at the plant grapple with titanic problems. The work can be life threatening. The aspect of serious play, discussed in more detail in the next chapter, is very important in their use of poetry. Outages are so stressful that levity is required to balance it. Their poetry has depth, it provides a way to “play” with strong emotions and explore the challenges they face. Some poems discuss heroism. Others invoke worry, relief, and wisdom. Each holds a story or a mystery.

John’s River Station Haikus

The Outage The outage is coming, The outage is coming. One if by MD&A, Two if by FW/Zack, Three if by GE; Aspirin Aspirin Aspirin!!!	Blast Gates Worn, leaking badly Fly ash here, there, everywhere New gates, new life, great.
The Higher Haiku Thin like margarine All my footsteps are guided. We’ve got it covered!	The Spot Docks, drains, separators, ponds; Sheens, smells, spills, and leaks. Ever moving, Never found.
Susan’s Haiku Normal day Concerns arise. Stress, tears, prayer Good report, rejoice!

Developing The Competency Of Imaging

Imaging is a part of what author Eric Booth calls “the everyday work of art”—but it takes practice and awareness.¹⁵ Here are some ways to further develop your imaging competency at both the personal and community levels.

Visual Verbal Journals

Practically all scientists, artists, and inventors keep some form of what we call a visual verbal journal (VVJ), a journal of both words and illustrations, for tracking their observations and ideas. VVJs are an effective way to develop your competence in imaging. First off, they are typically private, so they provide a place to try out ideas before taking them public. Secondly, a working journal integrates the technical and the personal and provides a risk-free place to develop your personal voice and style. Lastly, a VVJ blurs the lines between R- and L-modes—words and pictures, analysis and synthesis, thought and emotions, focus and tangent—and thus is an ideal practice for creative leadership.

The technologists at ORC often explored new angles in their journals. Says one manager:

When an event occurs, I make a picture about it in my journal. Later, looking at the picture, I notice so many things. In the middle of the discussion or meeting, you miss so many details. By remembering it with the picture I can see important details that went unnoticed. Many times that’s the solution.

Another emerging leader told us:

Journaling is a regular thing for me now. I am not artistically inclined, but I have done some drawing in it. I'm an engineer, so I'm going to diagram things; I'm going to flowchart things. If I want to do just a special piece of correspondence, I go to that VVJ and work it out there before I do it in final form. I had a situation with a peer where he and I disagreed. I rarely am raised to the level of anger—I pride myself on control—but this time was difficult. I used the VVJ to work it out and then addressed it with the peer. Without the VVJ it would have been much longer and more collateral damage would have been done.

If you don’t currently keep a VVJ, start one. If you do, make sure you use it for observation and analysis as well as aesthetics. Use it to craft new ideas and play with old ones. For artists and creative professionals a VVJ tends to be mainly aesthetic, but with a great deal of analysis and even science: What works? How do we know? What’s the formula?

Tips for keeping a VVJ:

Keep it in a notebook separate from other papers. Plan on a series of such journals, with nice bindings. Embellish the cover with symbols of your personal identity. Keep and protect it in a private place.

Cultivate an artistic style in the way you sketch or illustrate in the VVJ. Acquire a fine set of color pens strictly for the journal. Some people like to use a high-quality fountain pen for entries.

Cultivate a scientific style in the way you gather and weigh evidence, and create new hypotheses.

Pick a theme for the journal and stick to it. But don’t let it become a catchall. Consider keeping more than one journal, each with its own focus. The theme might be personal, around your career development for example, or important life lessons. It might be scientific, around some key question you want to crack. Or, it may be around one particular complex challenge.

Some people prefer to journal on the computer. Keep a special file, intended for permanency and regularly backed up. Date the entries. Paste in items from other sources.

Return to past VVJs on a regular basis for reflection on ideas and insight into your development. One colleague spends a day around every tenth birthday—age 30, age 40 … —dusting off and reflecting on the entries of the past decade.

Root Metaphors

Deep within us exist metaphors that guide the way we are, the lives we live, the things for which we feel passion, the work we desire, and the work we do that sustains us or takes us to the next step in our leadership journey. These root metaphors are the images we return to when describing ourselves and making sense of our lives. They are touchstones and beacons that guide us. They are lighthouses that keep us from foundering on unseen rocks, or distant stars that pull us towards them, maintaining our orbits or trajectories.

Organizations and individuals alike have metaphors woven into the fiber of who they are and how they act. Yet we are often unconscious of the metaphors. Part of our leadership journey has to do with discovering these metaphors by paying attention to our own lives and tracing consistent themes and patterns that play out over our lives.

Root metaphors are as unique as our own DNA. One person is a rock. Another identifies with an eagle. One executive we worked thinks of himself as a farmer. His metaphor helps him notice the emergence of a new idea or opportunity, weed out unworkable experiments, and patiently nurture an idea into a ripe application. As a manager of other scientists, the farming metaphor guides him in creating an environment in which the work of others flourishes. The metaphor provides him with a source of compelling language for envisioning the growth of his department and the people in it.

When David was a child of nine, his father told him they were direct descendents of the great explorer, Ferdinand Magellan, who was the first to circumnavigate the world. David was over forty before he realized just how well the Magellan metaphor has guided his life. For David, exploration into uncharted territory, whether out in the world or inside himself, has been a constant theme. Fascinated with the process of innovation he has been an R&D engineer in the computer business. Passionate about music he has also been an itinerant folk singer. Geographically, he has lived and worked in several countries around the world from a very early age. As a leader, David’s quest has been to navigate new areas of endeavor without the aid of well-documented maps.

Metaphoric storytelling is a very powerful device for developing vivid imagery and imagination skills. It also provides a method for discovering the metaphors that punctuate our individual leadership journeys.

What are your root metaphors? Have they come from family, teachers, fables or nursery rhymes, catalytic events, geography, history, literature? How do they play out in your life and your leadership work? How might they guide you through intricate challenges? How do they illuminate your strengths and development challenges? Take the time to think about, write down or diagram your root metaphors in your visual verbal journal. Keep it in mind when you find yourself stumped or run into roadblocks—you just may find a new perspective there.

The Root metaphor is a deep connection between personalizing and imaging. It is a source of images as you develop as a leader. The metaphors that enlighten you about who you are, are the very ones that will help you navigate through turbulent waters. Your root metaphors are a powerful connection to your passion. The metaphors will evolve as you evolve.

Developing Community Competence

Old-style imaging used to be a top-down affair in which visions and symbols were used to control behaviors. New-style imaging is a participatory affair that leaders and communities can encourage in a number of ways.

Develop Physical Space. Physical workspaces can either enhance or limit the ability for shared imaging. Create workspaces that incorporate reusable wall space for collage, sketching, movie-making and similar activites. Repurpose traditional spaces such as bulletin boards, whiteboards, hallways, windows, and external cubical walls. ORC created a “war room” dedicated to ongoing strategy development and competitive analysis. The latest iteration of the star maps could usually be found on one wall, comparative activities of competitors on another.

Develop Virtual Space. Virtual space provides an accessible studio and gallery for shared imagery. Shared digital whiteboards are good for letting people sketch ideas as they talk, or for marking up documents. Digital cameras are now cheap and easy to use and let people post pictures of what they are discussing online. The Motley Fool, for example, is an online personal finance resource that includes vivid storytelling as a way to personalize otherwise abstract topics. (For more on The Motley Fool, see Chapter 7).

Legitimize Visual Analysis. Communities legitimize what kinds of “languages” can be used for communication. If town meetings are conducted entirely in business-speak and bullet points, that sends out a message about the ground rules for participation in the community. Orion Research Center greatly enhanced leadership participation by people of various cultural and functional groups because they legitimized storytelling, metaphors, and the use of image-based processes such as star-mapping.

Increase Shared Imagery. Too often corporate images are imposed top-down and are officially hands-off. Shared meaning-making requires that people be able to get their hands on the images in circulation, morph them as a way of sense-making and communication, and receive feedback from others on the impact of the evolving images. If you establish a norm for handcrafted imagery, you encourage and support others’ participation in leadership. Try banning PowerPoint for just one meeting, and use only paper and colored markers instead. Ask directors to create public displays or posters for their quarterly reports instead of packets of numbers that few others ever look at. Steve, a regional sales manager, had his team create a 20-minute video of a breakthrough project with a key client. The video became a point of pride and was circulated to other sales regions.

Continue to Develop Trust. For inspired collaboration, groups need to be open and honest. Community members must be able to comment on the functions and aesthetics of organizational imagery without fear of censure. How you encourage collaborative imaging—and how you respond to the results of collaboration—sends the strongest message.

CAUTIONS

Like any of the C2 Competencies, imaging comes with risks as well as advantages. Competence in imaging comes with practice, and from watching others who are good at it. Images tend to be more slippery and open to interpretation than words—although language is saturated with metaphor—and in practice the control it offers is often illusory.

Cultural Considerations. General Motor’s proud Nova brand—“bright star” in English—hit a bump in Mexico because in Spanish, nova means “won’t go!” The Hewlett Packard icon of the original Palo Alto garage in which Dave Hewlett and Bill Packard began the business stands proudly for the basic idea of “invention.” But German consumers tend to have a very different interpretation of the garage icon; they see it as a decrepit old shack—the antithesis of high-quality industrial production that the image intends.

Threats to Established Order. Imaging invites participation, which sometimes can threaten established order. When ambiguity and uncertainty are explored through images it can create anxiety, compared with the relative comforts of authoritative leadership. When we use images to help people discover their own path through the complexity, we practice a new order of leadership. Imagery provides a new source of participative meaning making; however, organizations are just beginning to understand what Sally Helgesen calls “webs of inclusion.”

Manipulating Images. The evolution scientist Richard Dawkins writes, “A brain that is good at simulating models in imagination is also, almost inevitably, in danger of self-delusion.”¹⁶ Images are not free from misuse. They can be employed for enchantment and deception.¹⁷ They have been used to impose tyranny. Hitler used the new media quite powerfully to construct a nightmarish vision and literally project it onto the senses of the population.

“Visual capture” is what psychologists call the tendency of compelling sensory input to invade and hold our attention. Television, advertising, architecture all take advantage of the power of the image to seize the imagination. James Joyce called this “the ineluctable modality of the visual.” The danger is that misinformation and stereotypes can be forced on us through aggressive imaging techniques.

Maintaining Checks and Balances. Every metaphor both illuminates and hides. The trap occurs when we come to believe that our particular image of reality is reality itself. Several of our colleagues at ORC see danger if there is unbalanced reliance on images and pattern perception:

Biases in some cases were built into the visual images [star maps]. Yes, I do see patterns. I see patterns a lot. Sometimes I see that as a hindrance. I try to struggle not to fall into a certain thinking pattern, or behavior pattern. Because once you've fallen into the pattern, then you probably lose the creativity.

The role of the leader-poet is often to “make it strange,” providing eye-popping perspectives, shaking us out of our ruts.¹⁸ The trouble is, that which shakes us up can dig the new rut:

We may thus be caught and fossilized by the very power available to us in particular metaphors … [if] we take a similarity as evidence of an identity, if we come to believe that our particular metaphoric view of reality is in very truth reality itself.¹⁹

* * *

Yes, there is danger in creating new images—and there is danger in not creating them. In times of complexity, soliciting wider participation in creative leadership becomes vital. Literacy in imaging, then, is a necessary complement to verbal literacy for empowered consumers, employees, and leaders.

How often do we effectively make and re-make our visual world rather than passively succumb to its enchantments and deceptions? How can we create the metaphors that allow positive growth and change? These are important questions for creative leaders to answer in their own realms of influence. The curriculum for a 21^st century literacy of imagery is still largely unwritten, but it can be discovered in the context of the other competencies we discuss—attention, personalizing, play, co-inquiry, and crafting. The cultivation of one’s own critical poetic sensibilities, in the broadest sense, is a good base to competently create images, discern their meanings, and guard against their excesses.

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1. “Making thought visible” is a central theme in the work of Dr. Betty Edwards (the phrase itself she borrows from George Orwell), which she engages through various kinds of drawing. See Edwards, B. Drawing on the Artist Within: An Inspirational and Practical Guide to Increasing Your Creative Powers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986.

2. McCarthy, B. About Learning. 1996. North Barrington, IL: Excel, Inc. 1996. McCarthy calls this learning cycle 4MAT. The 4MAT model finishes the 8-step learning cycle with these steps (the language has been adapted in terms of our own research): practice, play, refine, craft. It works like this: When the first half of the cycle culminates in formal concepts and rules, these require practice towards understanding of the basics. Play with the mastered basics allows extension, flexibility, and mastery. Refinement is a further analytical step that takes the tinkering produced by play and uses it to update the formal concepts and rules. Finally, craftinghttp://www.aboutlearning.com/ . integrates the learning into the big picture of the person or organization, as a completed product or realized mission. Further information on this useful model can be found at

3. Bronowski, J. A Sense of the Future: Essays in Natural Philosophy. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977. p. 26.

4. Schwartz, P. The Art of the Long View. New York: Doubleday/Currency, 1991.; van der Heijden, K. Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996.

5. Stephen Jay Gould reports this from travels in Athens in Gould, S.J. “Four Metaphors in Three Generations,” in Dinosaur in a Haystack: Reflections in Natural History. New York, NY: Harmony Books. 442-457. 1995. In the same article Gould argues that “Darwin … sensed that imagery and metaphor must be used as indispensable tools in the art of persuasion (p. 450).”

6. Levy, S. Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything. New York: Penguin Books, 2000. p. 100.

7. Lakoff, G., and Johnson, M. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.; Jaynes, J. The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1976.

8. Kelly, G.A. The Psychology of Personal Constructs. New York, NY: Norton, 1955.; Mair, M. "Metaphors for Living," Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 1976.

9. Roger Nierenberg’s work can be accessed on the web at www.themusicparadigm.com

10. Mair, M. "Metaphors for Living," Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 1976, p280.

11. Zaltman, J. and Coulter, R.H. “Seeing the Voice of the Customer: Metaphor-Based Advertising Research.” Journal of Advertising Research, 35 (4), 1995.; Pink, D.H. “Metaphor Marketing.” Fast Company, 14, 1998, p. 214.

12. Whyte, D. The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America. New York: Currency/Doubleday, 1996.

13. Pandya, M. “They're In A Position To Mix Metaphors With Business.” New York Times, November 27, 1994.

14. John F. Kennedy, Last major public address, at dedication of Robert Frost Library, Amherst College, 26 October, 1963. Kennedy spoke to honor the death of Robert Frost, his favorite poet, who had spoken at his inaugural and dedicated a poem to him.

15. Booth, E. The Everyday Work of Art: How Artistic Experience Can Transform Your Life. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 1997.

16. Dawkins, R. Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

17. In his autobiographical book Speak, Memory, novelist, poet, and lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov reports that he "discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that [he] sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of enchantment and deception."

18. “Make it strange”—see it fresh, push the limits, re-invent, so it can be seen at all—was the dictum of the poet Ezra Pound.

19. Mair, M. "Metaphors for Living," Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 1976. P. 254.