Morning Brew writers are masters of metaphor. If you haven't read the daily newsletter, check it out (you're missing out).
They like metaphors more than Elon Musk likes Twitter ("I just can't quit you").
These are from recent issues:
Like the last 30 minutes of The Return of the King, this saga is never quite over when you think it is. (referring to the Elon Musk Twitter purchase)
Stocks came out of the Q4 gate like Smarty Jones, with the S&P and Nasdaq posting their best first day of a quarter since 2009.
An NFL telecast without beer ads is like a wedding reception without “Shout.”
Technically these are similes (metaphors make a connection by saying something is something, while similes use the word like). Still, they have the same effect: they compare two things that are not exactly alike to make a point about one of the things.
Those who watched the final Lord of the Rings installment will know the last 30 minutes felt like the movie would never end.
Smarty Jones was a Kentucky Derby-winning horse who paints the perfect mental image of how stock prices surged.
And everyone who's been to a wedding after the release of Wedding Crashers has sung "Shout" at the top of their lungs - not doing so would make it feel like something is missing (like an NFL game without beer ads).
Similes and metaphors activate our imagination. They are relatable. They force us to link contradictory ideas. Without spelling it out, they cause us to infer something about the Musk-Twitter saga, stock prices, and beer ads during football games. Each of us interprets the same thing but in unique ways.
This is the first step in expressing the inexpressible.
Jumpstarting the Spiral of Knowledge
Ikujirō Nonaka documented three steps for converting tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge in his book, The Knowledge-creating Company. They are:
Linking contradictory things and ideas through metaphor
Resolving these contradictions through analogy
Crystallizing the created concepts in a model
The final step makes the knowledge available to the rest of the company. One of the famous examples is the story of innovation at Honda, in Japan, in the late 1970s.
Honda's problem was their two models, the Civic and the Accord, were too familiar. The new post-war generation entering the car market wanted something different. They had to innovate. They needed to gamble.
Honda's top management didn't know this new post-war generation, so they assembled a team of young developers (average age of 27) and challenged them to invent a brand-new car concept that was "inexpensive, but not cheap." They bet this young team had the answers (tacit knowledge) but needed a way to get it out (to turn it into explicit knowledge).
Enter the metaphor.
Step one: metaphor - The Theory of Automobile Evolution
Like Morning Brew use to bring you the news, Honda's team leader, Hiroo Watanabe, expressed the team's challenge with a metaphor: The Theory of Automobile Evolution. He related the theory of evolution to a machine. What can a theory about living organisms possibly have to do with cars? Therein lies the magic.
Metaphoric images present two things that are seemingly different and distant. This creates a discrepancy or conflict. As humans, we are programmed to resolve conflict. This conflict jump-starts the creative process, precisely what happened at Honda.
"The phrase described an ideal. In effect, it posed the question, If the automobile were an organism, how should it evolve?" - Ikujirō Nonaka.
The team was now equipped to combine what they knew separately in new ways and begin to express what they knew but could not yet say.
Step two: analogy - Man-maximum, Machine-minimum
The goal of step two is to bring structure to the creative process by reconciling contradictions and making distinctions. Teams can use an analogy to clarify how the two ideas in one metaphor are alike and not alike.
As the Honda team grappled with Watanabe's metaphor, they came upon an answer in the form of an analogy: man-maximum, machine-minimum. This represented a resolution of the conflict, a balancing of the relationship between man and machine, and a nod to their mission's evolutionary (and indeed, revolutionary) nature.
"This [analogy] captured the team’s belief that the ideal car should somehow transcend the traditional human-machine relationship." - Ikujirō Nonaka
Using analogy becomes an intermediate step between pure imagination and logical thinking.
Step three: a model - Tall Boy
The final step, to create an actual model, completes the journey to logical thinking.
The Honda team wanted to build a lighter and cheaper car (machine-minimum) but also something more comfortable and solid than other traditional cars (man-maximum). The concept they eventually came up with was the image of a sphere – a car short in length and tall in height. It had more room for the passenger while taking up less space on the road and less for the engine and mechanical systems. The team called the product concept Tall Boy.
The concept car captured the imagination of the higher-ups at Honda, and production was approved for a new model based on the Tall Boy.
Enter the Honda City.
Nearly 150,000 City cars were sold in the first two years after its launch, but the impact extended to the entire car industry in Japan.
"The City’s revolutionary styling and engineering were prophetic. The car inaugurated a whole new approach to design in the Japanese auto industry based on the man-maximum, machine-minimum concept, which has led to the new generation of “tall and short” cars now quite prevalent in Japan." - Ikujirō Nonaka.
Takeaways
The Spiral of Knowledge was complete, converting tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge. From The Theory of Automobile Evolution to “man-maximum-machine-minimum” to Tall Boy, the Honda project team was able to express the inexpressible.
The Honda leadership team deserves enormous credit for what they did. Not only did they delegate the task of designing a new car to a young team, but they let them devise how to approach the challenge themselves in their own words. By breaking down the problem (metaphor) and understanding it in their own words (analogy), the young team was able to create a new concept (model) that revolutionized an industry.
I encourage you now to think about your teams. Which group with potential are you betting has the answers, and how can you help them access these solutions and make them available to the rest of the company?
We specialize in helping leaders and sales teams do just this. Let me know if you'd like to chat here.
What role do leaders and teams play in this process of knowledge creation?
We’ll find out next week ✌️