Great metaphors that illustrate significant approaches to innovation

1. The ‘truancy’ approach embraces the wait (allowing insight to unfold)

‘The ball I threw while playing in the park, has not yet reached the ground…’ 

(Should Lanterns Shine, Dylan Thomas)

Thomas’s thrown ball seems to be defying gravity and time itself, becoming a suspended image for the freedom of his childhood. Although we only experience this liberated state for a short time, it continues to have an impact over the course of our lives. In this metaphor, life has been arrested in mid air, still in the process of discovery. Through this Thomas suggests that we can only ever have a gradually unfolding understanding of the psychological impact of childhood on our later life. This idea opens up how small events in our past might become increasingly significant over time, but we cannot yet know which will have the greatest impact. The insight illustrated here is to realise that the impact of our childhoods are still unfolding within us and it’s always too soon to tell. We can at best only slowly feel our way through the unforeseen nature of the influence it may have on us.

The way we acquire new knowledge and inhabit any associated networks of understanding often unfolds gradually. But any hesitation can be taken as an opportunity for a ‘reculer pour mieux sauter’, a drawing back in order to leap further. To gain a clearer understanding of our world, we will have to embrace the wait. All of which reinforces the importance to our deeper thought processes of postponements, and resisting the urge to reach out for a satisfying conclusion that fulfils our need for resolution, but at the expense of complexity. For many inventive scientists and artists (Black, Feynmann, Tartini, Coleridge), this ‘out of time’ meandering consciousness is seen to be an essential breeding ground where new ideas can be born. When Gauss commented, ‘I have had my solutions for a long time, I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them…’ perhaps he was alluding to this, he just hadn’t been able to get there yet. As Morgan believed, it is important to ‘saturate yourself through and through with your subject…and wait.’ Not only is our lingering eye more able to see the connections and differences between things that are already known and understood, but that the process of lingering itself offers us the space to more easily cut between the known and the unknown. By holding off the direct rush to judgement we are allowing other possibilities to open up.

This approach sets up the need for a deferral, a dwelling time as a way to open up further possibilities in our thinking that may not have occurred or played out yet and to allow hidden understandings to reveal themselves. It suggests that we need to find ways to detour and explore the hinterland of an idea in order to hold off immediate judgement.

2. The ‘rupture’ approach seeks seismic shifts (inviting dislocation)

‘The Earth turns over, our side feels the cold…’ 

(Poem Number ix, W.H. Auden)

Auden’s metaphor is simply and almost literally breath-taking. It is an astronomical image of passing time, but through a sudden beautiful shift in his thoughts, he sees the connection between the Earth turning and himself turning over in bed. The metaphor transports us from the global to the personal in one breath, one moment, one movement. A disconcerting breach occurs, one without transition. We pick up on a sense of the earth somehow sliding away from the sun. When that untoward rupture takes place our personal world also tilts and we are instantly defamiliarised. The realisation of the break happens so fast that there is an immediate feeling of disorientation—or rather, of being oriented toward everywhere else in a kind of sliding universality. We become unmoored.

Such metaphors summon strangeness, making the familiar unfamiliar. They jar us in an all-at-once, all-in-one quantum leap into the dark or into the depths. It breaks the spell of unnoticed confinement by setting up imagined alternatives, an escape plan to avoid compliance. We tend to harbour deeply held preconceptions which are likely to make us resistant, even blind, to alternative ideas, particularly if those ideas appear to contradict the embedded frames which shape our view of ourselves or the world. Such metaphors shift us further than we might want to go, beyond what is reliable and known. Brief eruptions of activity open up new territories, break down frontiers and offer quite impetuous advances. This process exposes us to the adjacent possible – a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself. Kuhn writes that, ‘scientists hold institutionalised everyday beliefs, which may, on occasion, be altered by a transformational discovery… For some, those paradigms never evolve, but for the fortunate they do change.’ These Kuhnian leaps into the darkness occur rarely, but they look beyond the existing order to imagine something that completely reframes what has happened before. Maxwell, Goffman, Fermi, Firestein, and Poole all believed in the significance of this dissonant process. Progress in science tends to be neither gradual, linear nor continuous. The breaking down of frontiers between previously unrelated territories is key. In the same way that there can be a blocked matrix in an individual’s mind the same can be said for various impasses in science. Old orthodoxies are confronted. To invent, in Souriau’s words, we are required to ‘think aside’. We learn most from moments that jar rather than moments that gel.

This approach sets up how a sudden deliberately disorientating idea can be a way to abruptly shift our focus, to disrupt and transform the landscape of our established thinking. It suggests that we need to create uncertainty and dissonance to breach the grooves of habit and force us to reframe and reassess what we may have believed was our position.

3. The ‘immersion’ approach merges perceptions (dropping boundaries)

‘Now the day stirs. Colour returns. The day waves yellow with all its crops…’ 

(The Waves, Virginia Woolf)

Here, Woolf describes the dawn of a new day. The sun is rising and colour is returning, finally filling the day completely with its intense yellow fire. It stirs into being. We can see this scene in all of its beauty and also its strangeness. Woolf avoids using the idea of crops waving. For her, and therefore for us, it is the very fabric of the day itself, saturated in yellow, that becomes a sea of moving colour. Through Woolf’s eyes we see a yellowness so intense and conquering, it seems to reveal its very pigment and takes over the scene. Like brush strokes, her words are given the licence to become colours in her hands, soft and pliable, their aim to somehow yoke the images together. We see a dawn that itself, through her vision, becomes animated, a wave in the mind that is suggestive of some suddenly grasped complexity. The insight is to open our eyes wider and allow colours to take over entire days  and landscapes. The metaphor does not seek to show similarity, but rather it aims to create similarity.

In order to invent, we need the space to notice, to shape, to push things around into new sequences, to move meaning around on a palate. By throwing things together, we can discover new ways of seeing, that we can then inhabit. Meaning doesn’t lie around waiting to be picked up, it has to be actively discovered. Great metaphors don’t just point to meaning, they create it. They don’t just discover similarities, they forge them. The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing or seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. With a slight shift in the focus of a camera lens, the seemingly trivial can be transformed into the wondrous. The essence of the creative act is bringing disparate ideas together, by dropping notional boundaries. Einstein argued that, ‘after a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in aesthetics, plasticity, and form…The greatest scientists are always artists as well.’ In a similar vein, Max Planck, wrote that the pioneer scientist must have, ‘a vivid intuitive imagination for new ideas not generated by deduction, but by an artistically creative imagination.’ They both saw a world that is tantalisingly open to interpretation, to chance discoveries, where patterns will inevitably emerge if we keep our minds open through fuelling immersion and versatility, searching for a matrix which might be found by way of analogy, association or similarity.

This approach sets up a more fluid environment for us to inhabit so that patterns and insights can emerge and similarities can be created. It suggests that we need to mix up the ways that we see and sequence our ideas so that we are given the chance to shape and move meaning around. 

4. The ‘alienating’ approach extends perspectives (broaching the alien)

‘Over the cage floor the horizons come…’ 

(The Jaguar, Ted Hughes)

Hughes shows us in this image that he is the master of estrangement. He is simply choosing to ‘become’ the caged Jaguar and seeing what thoughts occur to him, trying to show us how Nature itself might think. This is a radical perspective, to take the spirit of an animal, giving us an intensely compressed reading of the jaguar’s behaviour and soul. Hughes takes us into a different existence, into a different mental dimension. Unlike the other zoo animals, the Jaguar refuses to accept the limitations of its cage and seems to believe it has the capacity to conquer the limitations of its confinement. The cage surrounding it cannot contain the creatures own willed horizons. This animal, in all its power and freedom of spirit, can see hope and a different future, despite the cage, and the reality of its situation therefore has no power. The world lies under its feet due to the wildness that still resides within its eyes and heart. The image strongly suggests how the Jaguar has a sense of commanding everything, including the shifts of light itself. The Jaguar believes he is the driving force of the planet, and as such, owns the capacity to conquer time and to make the ‘horizons come.’ The metaphor celebrates this defiance through a language that conveys the Jaguar’s imaginative agility. To acquire these new unfamiliar perspectives, Hughes suggests, we must suspend our own. 

To extend our own thought we can take on the hypothetical nature of metaphor and enter deeply unfamiliar territories. Bertrand Russell recognised the ‘immense, wider, wondrous and implacable forces of the non human’ within him which ‘dwarfed the human’. We can become something ‘other’ than ourselves and can see how the world might appear differently. This is to understand the power to imagine away a cage that confines you, and to see yourself moving the horizon. Richard Feynman can think himself to be a dancing molecule, discarding the detachment of the expert and throwing himself into the activity of the elements involved. He becomes one of the molecules. For the moment the rigid formulae don’t govern, and he feels what happens to a molecule. Kekulé sees the cyclic structure of benzene by identifying himself with a snake swallowing its tail. Einstein too recognised the role of empathic personal identification and suspension of self awareness, as did Brunel (burrowing shipworms) and Harvey (exposed hearts of fish) in processes of invention that enabled them to step out of themselves and see beyond their own personal boundaries. The identity cards are reshuffled until the vision and the visualiser became interchangeable.

This approach sets up a radical consciousness and agency that enables us to see into the life of others and to relinquish ourselves and re-conceptualise our environment. It suggests that we take on a new self, set up a rival reality that offers us the chance to completely unhook as a way to escape our particular reality. 

5. The ‘unknowing’ approach makes strange (transcending rationality)

‘The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope…’ 

(Wind, Ted Hughes)

The irresistible power of this metaphor gives us a sense of almighty havoc and impending doom. The onslaught of the wind threatens the very fabric of the landscape almost like it is bending the horizon of the world itself. The tent image suggests a temporariness and tension, as if the hills could just flap up and be blown away as the wind blasts them.We see thatthe world has been made unsafe in this struggle. The now entirely animated world that is often beyond us offers a sudden apprehension of an intensity in our relationship with reality. All around becomes charged with meaning, threatening to explode, destroy or test us to the limit. It suggests we are moved by a greater elemental force than ourselves or our thoughts. We are here being offered the frightening territory of the unconscious. 

Metaphor is a way of thought long before it is a way with words. Creative problem solving is aided by the forgetting of misleading clues and a liberation from the over precise tyranny of verbal concepts. The process of idea generation is seated deep within our unconscious mind and is most active when our conscious processes of analytical thought are subverted. The moment of truth, the sudden emergence of a new insight, seems a powerful act of intuition. Such intuitions give the appearance of miraculous flashes, short-circuits of reasoning, but may result from giving in to ideas churning around below the threshold of consciousness.Conscious and unconscious experiences form a continuous scale of gradations, of degrees of awareness. The temporary relinquishing of conscious control liberates the mind from certain constraints that have become an impediment to a creative leap. The permeability between the two allows for unique connections to be made without our consciousness trying to make logical order out of the problem. Carpenter believed, ‘the action of the brain, through unconscious cerebration, produces results which might never have been produced by thought. One thought can arise immediately after another without there having been any apparent associative link between them.’  When the unconscious takes over, thought can be transformed through unanticipated transitions, abrupt cross-cuts and cognitive leaps into the unknown. The problem solver is no longer fixated on inappropriate strategies for solving the problem. Lamartine concurred, ‘I never think–my thoughts think for me.’  In 1869, the periodic table arranged itself in Mendeleev’s unconscious mind, consolidating the images and connections he had been making, so that they fell into a pattern. Henri Poincaré certainly believed that the role of the unconscious in mathematical invention was incontestable.

This approach sets up the territory of our unconscious to purposefully encourage disorder and to explore the irrational. It suggests that we go beyond words and surrender ourselves to explosions of hidden likenesses and visualisations and tolerate chaos, in order to shift us beyond the already known.

6. The ‘bridging’ approach mediates connections (challenging frameworks)

‘A sense of falling, like an arrow shower sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain…’

(The Whitsun Weddings, Philip Larkin)

With this metaphor Larkin gives us thesense of longbows being lifted and strings let loose, the arrow-shower morphing into rain in the form of an unfolding movement that connects distinct locations and points of time. While the overall metaphor implies the inevitable disappointment of love, as the arrow leaves the bow only to dissolve midair into falling rain, the arrows of rain are also a visionary image of expansion and release. We see the arrows and understand the transformation into another realm entirely. Larkin asks us to apprehend a different relationship between things, to change our perception regarding the conflicts, contrasts and contradictions of life. He creates an image of continuity, lost possibilities, ambivalence, offering us a marriage, combining desire and disappointment. Where the rain is drab and mundane, the transformation itself is startling. Larkin challenges our minds to connect highly disparate images and ideas out of sight. Perhaps hope is unattainable, and the focus and precision of the (Cupid or Mars) arrows melts into a pathetic fallacy of rain, or the rain offers virility and fertility, hopeful connotations of change. Love has the potential of complementarity, suggesting that the poet sees the thread, the bond that can create a harmony out of dissonance. 

Creative acts unearth hidden analogies between unrelated frames of reference and improbable partners. Lorca calls metaphors ‘equestrian leaps’ that carry things over and unite two worlds. Viewing a new field with fresh eyes, and bringing prior knowledge, can result in areas of unsuspected overlap. Indeed, Borden argues that, ‘most advances in science come when a person for one reason or another is forced to change fields.’ Bartlett simply asserts that the ‘critical stages for advance in science are reached when what has been called one body of knowledge can be brought into close and effective relationship with what has been treated as a different independent scientific discipline.’  Henri Poincaré is clear, ‘among chosen combinations of ideas the most fertile will often be those formed of elements drawn from domains which are far apart’. Niels Bohr’s complementarity principle concurs, ‘ask not whether light was a particle or a wave,’ as both concepts are necessary to describe nature. This cross fertilisation across disciplines is seen from Kepler’s unification of theology and astronomy with gravity’s actions being analogous to the Holy Ghost, through to the linkages between subject disciplines, observations, facts and existing knowledge of Pasteur and Darwin. This permeabilityof fields permits interdisciplinary thought which is an example of both/and rather than either/or thinking.

This approach sets up a sense of connectivity that wants to fasten together different worlds and give us fresh ways to reconcile seemingly incompatible ideas. It suggests that we need to further explore the permeability of thought and shows that if we develop a comparative mind it will allow us to develop greater interdisciplinary thought.

7. The ‘abrasive’ approach sharpens sensitivities (cutting internal barriers)

‘Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust…’ 

(Duchess of Malfi, John Webster)

Webster comments on fate with this intriguing metaphor, suggesting that we are all punished and suffer fates according to our sins. What will hurt us in life comes from within. Our innermost drives become damaging forces. The slicing word cut implies a painful, harsh reality to our journey. The metaphor appeals in its precision and physicality. We use diamonds to cut diamonds. Interestingly, the jagged aptness of this image, packing together its sound and diction, sheds further light. It suggests that pain connects our levels of existence. The act of excavation and the act of creation are not so different. The excoriating process that exposes us to our own vulnerabilities can also lead us, diamond-like, to become sharper and clearer. It strips us back and offers a direct short cut to our bedrock essence, to the profundity that lies below the physical surface. Such a painful search for meaning reveals who we are. This helps us to see our world ‘mis a nu’, stripped bare. This requires the courage to keep investigating deep within ourselves, cutting through our carefully developed defence mechanisms, our fixed certainties, stripping away from ourselves the layers of dust of everyday life that form our defensive associations, our preference towards safety and accommodation.

Doubt is at the very core of inventive thinking. When we ask exploratory questions, leaving room for doubt is a requirement. Unfortunately, we tend to adhere to deeply held ideas and principles that we have developed over time and no longer question. Psychologists refer to this as ‘dogmatic cognition,’ which constrain the possibilities that we are prepared to consider. There is too much crystallization within us, forming frozen seas and scripted thoughts. This needs to be broken through, releasing our grip on our own solidified expertise. Trying to reach the open mind of a beginner is essential if you are trying to innovate, but also if you want to remain an expert in any field. Moving to the next level of skill or knowledge often demands the letting go of beliefs and attitudes acquired at earlier stages of learning. Maxwell, Dawkins, Higgins, Fermi and Firestein have all in their time supported the idea that a thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in thinking. Simply stated, any discovery becomes the uncovering of new ignorance, and implies a certain readiness in us to break up what Dawkins calls the anaesthetic of familiarity. We need to overcome the neural and psychological barriers and lethargies that can impede us from looking beyond the existing order as we see it.

This approach sets up our search to develop a beginner’s mind as a way to reveal our own ignorance and cut through the anaesthetic of our familiarities. It suggests that we need to strip back our world to bedrock, to uncover our vulnerabilities, in order to expose and break through our frozen thinking.