Sports Analogies LO16660

Dr. Steve Eskow (dreskow@magicnet.net)
Sun, 18 Jan 1998 21:11:48 -0500

Replying to LO16590 --

Steve Levy--and his wife--speculate on why some of us--mostly, they
suspect, macho males--use sports analogies.

Steve suggests that there is something out there which might be called
"reality" ,which we can find if we stop insisting on looking for it
through the tinted glasses of metaphor. (How about that "tinted glasses"
metaphor?)

>A learning organization should be able to nucleate itself by uniquely
>pursuing paths never before seen or flowing naturally to a place never
>before reached. I believe that the use of metaphors merely delays or
>diverts us away from achieving a heightened state of awareness - one of
>the precursors to learning.

Can we really do without metaphor and look at reality without it?

Consider, for example, the metaphor is Steve's paragraph: how many are
there?

The obvious ones, of course, leap out at us.("Leap"? Hmm...)

"Heightened": clearly a spatial metaphor, implying that there is something
called a "state" (another metaphor, of course) that can be "higher" or
"lower". Is "higher" better than "lower," and if yes, why?How do I measure
this height: or is there "really" no "state" and no "height" in that
"reality" you're asking us to look at directly.

Now , Steve, a "learning organization," (metaphor?) should "nucleate"
itself? Does that image, that metaphor, come from biology or physics?

Here's a possibility, Steve.

Reality isn't real any more.

It's not out there just waiting for people to take off those metaphoric
glasses, see it accurately in all its pristine realness, and map it
accurately.

(That "map" metaphor again.)

Looking at organizational "entropy", as At and others do, is looking at
organizations metaphorically.

Looking at, say, 23 people as if they were a single entity we might call
by a single term--say the term "organization"--and then taking that
welding of 23 people into something singular called an "organization" one
metaphoric step forward and calling it a "learning organization," is one
way that metaphor begin to group and cohere: and become "reality".

As for me, Steve, I've said this before and I say it again:

I never metaphor I didn't like.

Steve Eskow

Dr. Steve Eskow
President, The Electronic University Network
288 Stone Island Road
Enterprise, Florida 32725
Phone: 407-321-8770; Fax: 407-321-4861
email: dreskow@magicnet.net

-- 

"Dr. Steve Eskow" <dreskow@magicnet.net>

Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>