The Art of Analogy
For as long as I can remember, I’ve made sense of the world through analogies. When I’m in command of a topic, I often use an analogy to lower barriers to understanding (e.g., “Does your brand have a brain?”). When I’m the one searching for a cognitive on-ramp to a dialogue (GPU-accelerated databases, anyone?), I’ll wade into the water with an analogy to start to test my understanding.
First things first: There’s a difference between analogy and metaphor, whether in the context of a writer’s workshop or the cult of D2C venture capital. I’m a huge fan of metaphor in its own right, but I’ll focus this discussion on analogy (simile gets an honorable mention at best; it is simply not as helpful to the cause of clarity, in my view, as the twin towers of A&M).
What is an analogy, then? It is something that shows how two things are alike, with the ultimate goal of making a specific point using the comparison. I’ve always thought of analogies as simple, fun ways to explain or understand something. They’re somewhere between firm fact and creative story – a sort of “imaginative concreteness” that invites someone to burn as few cognitive calories as possible while clearly understanding the essence of something.
Biology in Branding
Take a read and ask yourself which statement in each family is easier to understand as an entry point:
Statement Family 1
1a: GPU-accelerated computing is the employment of a graphics processing unit (GPU) along with a computer processing unit (CPU) in order to facilitate processing-intensive operations. GPU has programmable and non-programmable parallel pipelines that run some algorithms, like rendering and matrix multiplication, much faster than CPUs do.
1b: Say you’ve got a buddy named CPU who runs a 4-hour marathon. You think that’s fast, until you meet her buddy GPU, who runs that same marathon in 30 minutes… then does it 99 more times over the next 99 days. That’s the power of a GPU over a CPU – sustained speed at scale.
Statement Family 2
PagerDuty gives you real-time visibility into your critical apps and services all in one place. When business-impacting issues strike, PagerDuty ensures you’re never caught off-guard by collecting data signals from anywhere, interpreting those signals using machine learning, automatically engaging the right people, and accelerating resolution and learning.
Think of PagerDuty as the central nervous system of your company. It’s software that controls the critical functions your business needs to operate.
Now I’m not advocating that an analogy does all the work – obviously, it’s just a way of starting the dialogue, or of getting over a bump in the conversational road. And, at some point, you have to wade through the complexity. But establishing cognitive clarity early on is important for generating real understanding and, ultimately, building trust.
Perhaps nothing exemplifies or draws upon analogy as powerfully or permanently as brand. In a broad sense, it’s the job of a brand to start a conversation, and to clarify why a company’s value proposition is relevant to its target audience. And the utility of analogies turns out to be quite high in high-tech brand context. Consider the work I was part of in 2018 framing PagerDuty as a company’s “central nervous system,” and in 2014 clarifying a role for BMC as the “DNA of the Digital Enterprise.” Though BMC has since leveled its positioning up the biological stack with its Autonomous Enterprise approach, the DNA helix that was the signature visual element of the original positioning still remains as of this writing.
(The intersections of biology and technology date back at least to Descartes in 1633, and may stretch back even further to (or at least be inspired by) Leonardo da Vinci’s analogies between humanity, spirituality, and the world. More recently, as the value of technology innovation has shifted from strength (car > horse) to speed (integrated circuits > transistors) to safety (VPN > unencrypted session) to smarts (AI > manual processing), technology-as-biology analogists like me have discovered a fondness for an entirely new playground: branding the digital brain. Whether moves like Adobe Sensei, Google Deepmind, or the infinitely ironic IBM Watson are platonic forms of brand strategy or just eye-rolling caricatures of themselves is for others to decide, but I believe if you can’t brand your brain, someone else will.)
Being More Inclusive
The challenge with analogies is that, because you aren’t describing exactly what you are describing, you’re asking your audience to take a cognitive leap. It’s when our analogies are creative and accurate that we clarify and persuade. But creativity and accuracy are not enough. The analogy must also be fueled by empathy. You have to know your audience, and you have to use analogies that make sense to them, given their lived experience (or ability and willingness to imagine something).
For instance, it’s easy to land the following analogy:
“It was like getting your hair cut with a blindfold on. I trusted that it would work out, but I had no proof until it was over.”
It’s doubtful you’ll ever encounter anyone who gets a haircut wearing a blindfold, but the analogy works because the listener can easily imagine that the key requirement in the situation is trust.
The following analogy (used by many leaders who had to cancel in-person events in the wake of the pandemic) requires no more imagination than the haircut example, but it is premised on an experience (air travel) that, compared to a haircut, fewer people have had:
“The landing gear was down - we were about to hit the runway, and then at the last minute, we pulled back up.”
In this case, one would have to make sure they were in the company of someone who’s had the privilege of traveling on an airplane (or could imagine it), and who could understand the analogy of best-laid-plans changing at the last minute given - and leading to more - uncertainty. Maybe not a huge leap among Western business audiences, but not likely to land well in an elementary school.
The worst fate of a storyteller is to have to explain an analogy. This is “smh”-worthy evidence that you’ve completely failed to land it. It’s a “Type 1” analogy error of sorts that I made for months as I tried repeatedly, to no avail, to use JR Smith’s handling of a situation in Game 1 of the 2018 NBA Finals as an analogy to business situations before finally being called out on my obfuscating behavior by colleagues who had no idea what I was talking about.
You also have to be careful of the “Type 2” analogy error, in which your audience believes it understands the analogy but in fact may not, or may not completely. This is often the case in the analogy of the human heart to a hydraulic pump used by instructors to biology students. How many of us really know how a hydraulic pump works?
A winning analogy – one that lands your point, simplifies something complex, and advances your audience’s understanding of a topic – depends both on your creativity in divining it and your ability to land it with your listeners. Creativity and accuracy are big numbers, but when you multiply them by zero by failing to factor empathy into the equation, they amount to nothing.
It is precisely because analogies allow us to subtly identify a shared experience – and use that commonality as a way to advance a dialogue – that analogy is art. Rather than coming at a person with linearity and facts, you come along with a person to a shared understanding of something.
Oh, and humor can go a long way too, even (or maybe especially) when the topic is sensitive. This all-time classic analogy by one of the great masters of the art, Sam Harris, is something to behold.
What could be more powerful than creating understanding where it didn’t exist before, and doing it in a way that signals that we’re on common ground? Analogy is a song that every one of us should build into our repertoires…or hardwired into our brains…or…