The Logo

The Research Center logo

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The MLRC chose a logo consistent with its mission.  Geese flying in a wedge formation confers many aerodynamic benefits to all the group members, except for the leader.  Each flies in the upwash from the wings of the bird ahead reducing drag by up to 65% and increasing range by 70%.  The birds rotate equally through the fatiguing role of leading.    Metaphor Mapping aims to align teams in an optimal way and help them achieve benefits similar to these astounding levels.

More detail about the benefits of flying in a “V” or wedge from wikipedia

 

Metaphors that help young people

Successful Adventures offers enrichment programs that help students build thinking, social and leadership skills.  At times, they use metaphors to help students set objectives:

http://www.successfuladventures.com/

What Yemen and Metaphor Mapping Have In Common

Tom Friedman wrote an NYT piece May 12, 2013 saying that, however unlikely it may sound, what is happening in Yemen is the best model for a successful outcome of the Arab Spring.

Why?  It’s because in contrast to countries such as Tunisia and Egypt, Yemen is establishing an inclusive dialog about their country, prior to drafting and voting on a new constitution.  “…different political factions, new parties, young people, women, Islamists, tribes, northerners and southerners are literally introducing themselves to one another in six months of talks…”

What’s this have to do with Metaphor Mapping?  They follow the same approach of inclusion and collaboration, where the dialog is the source of mutual understanding, new ideas and commitment to work together!

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/12/opinion/sunday/friedman-the-yemeni-way.html?_r=0

Metaphors in U.S. Politics

In the introduction to his May 2 column, David Books shows the breadth and impact of metaphors in the U.S. presidential campaign:

“What sort of thing is a presidential campaign?

  • Maybe a campaign is like a courtship. A candidate’s job is to woo the electorate, to win the people’s affection with charm, familiarity and compassion.
  • Maybe a campaign is like a big version of “American Idol.” It is a contest over who is the most talented. In this mode, a candidate’s job is to endear himself to the people in the audience with likability and then wow them with his gifts.
  • Maybe, on the other hand, hiring a president is like hiring a plumber. Voters aren’t really looking to fall in love with the guy; they just want someone who will fix the pipes. The candidate’s job is to list the three or four things he would do if elected and then to hammer home those deliverables again and again.
  • You could make a case that most campaigns are a little of all three, though the proportions vary from year to year. In 2008, Obama ran an uplifting campaign that was part courtship and part “American Idol.” Richard Nixon, who lacked such charm, ran workmanlike, plumber campaigns, no pun intended.
  • So far, though, the 2012 presidential campaign is fitting into none of these categories. It’s being organized according to a different metaphor. This year, both organizations seem to visualize the campaign as a boxing match or a gang fight. Whichever side can hit the other side harder will somehow get awarded the champion’s belt……”

Read more: http://www.stltoday.com/news/opinion/columns/david-brooks/david-brooks-courtship-or-war-in/article_24a5c104-1128-5a38-a844-1a085b109757.html#ixzz1twFOuCMO

Metaphors from a bass guitarist

I had the good fortune this week to speak with Abraham Laboriel, perhaps the greatest bass guitar player on the planet.  He’s an engaging person and music is the love of his life.  He’s also an extremely thoughtful guy and his conversation is full of metaphors:

“In contrast to many people in business, most musicians are not competing with each other.  They do what they do and they get along in harmony.  Just think about your head.  Are your ears angry they don’t have the leading role your nose has?  Does your chin think it can do better than your eyebrows?”

After thinking about his remarks, I realized that Metaphor Mapping directly addresses his point of how can people in a business get along as constructively and creatively as musicians.  First, Village Mapping helps people think out and see how they interact as part of a business operation.  It shows the overall context of their activities, what information is passed between them and what weaknesses they need to work on.  Of course, it’s also a great tool for creating a vision of how they should work together in the future, where their values are put into operation and they develop habits of effective inter-working.

Second, the Facecards language gives very explicit definitions of roles and responsibilities of each person involved in an activity.  Its visual nature and the clear symbolism of the Jack, Queen, King makes it emotionally clear as well.

The conversation went on to include:  “I studied engineering for two years and I remember vividly an experiment a physics teacher did.  He put a burner under a container of water with a thermometer in it.  The temperature moved up steadily but then it stopped.  And he asked us Why?

Hey, so we know the temperature stopped rising because the water started boiling. Changing the liquid to a gas used up the energy and stopped the temperature at the boiling point.”

Abe was relating a lot of things through this metaphor, including how musicians play together but there can come a time when they reach a whole new level.  It changes the whole landscape.

I couldn’t help myself thinking about this and how it applies to business, and my own consulting.  Village Mapping includes a volcano.  Its message is:  While you’re looking at your business operation (the buildings, roads, etc), remember to consider the possibility of changes that may totally re-make the landscape.  A liquid changing to a gas, for example, might provoke the idea that portions of your business might move to the web.  The thermometer that stays constant while the liquid is evaporating says, “don’t put full trust in your market surveys and measures of client satisfaction.”

I suspect Abe had a lot more wisdom to impart, but then his friends started jamming…

Metaphors and Wisdom

The April 7 issue of The Economist contained an interesting article on page 91, “Age and wisdom”. It mainly reports on the efforts of Dr. Igor Grossmann from the University of Waterloo Canada to compare accumulated wisdom between different countries and age groups.

The article defines what “psychologists agree” are five crucial aspects of wise reasoning:

1. Awareness that more than one perspective on a problem can exist

2. Recognition of the limits of personal knowledge

3. Appreciation of the fact that things may get worse before they get better

4. Willingness to seek opportunities to resolve conflict

5. Willingness to search for compromise

If those five points are accurate, gaining wisdom may be why participants feel so good at the end of Metaphor Mapping sessions.  Map building, particularly in cross-function groups, addresses:

1. The differences in each person’s perspective on a situation.  They become clear when made graphically visible in Village Maps.

2. Each person always has at least a nuance of difference from colleagues and sometimes great chasms

3. The incompleteness of any one individual’s knowledge is of a process or activity also is revealed when building Village Maps and leads to requests for colleagues to help

4. Optimists are warned that things can always be worse when they look at “volcanoes” that can change a Village’s environment or— when they look ahead for “crocodiles” on a River branch that could kill their career while they implement improvements

5. The map-building process encourages understanding the views of others, resolving conflicts and compromising when necessary

M4. Metaphor Mapping Mind Meld

Some people have remarked that building their first metaphor map is an astonishing experience:

“I never thought I’d get anything out of working with those guys.  We’d been on different sides of most issues for as long as I can remember.  Sometimes it was pretty intense.  But we got put together in the workshop and right off the bat things changed.  The four of us had to build a map of today’s situation and we had some trouble figuring out where to start.   The other groups had to build the same map but they looked like they knew what they were doing.  We finally got the idea of it and developed a great map we were proud to present.  I didn’t realize it at first, but we had agreed on what all the problems were.  A bit of tough discussion but in the end we saw things the same way.  We didn’t work together on the later maps but we talked at breaks and things are different between us now, better.”
There is most likely a scientific basis for this type reaction.  For example, neuroscience is discovering more about how and why human conversation works http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/07/mind-meld-enables-good-conversat.html.   Perhaps the shared challenge and its visual nature are a fast path to identity and team building.

A metaphor that makes science more accessible (and modelling efficient)

NOAA:  Predator-prey model explains how rain can feast on clouds

Model is a simpler way to view cloud-rain interactions, say Boulder and Israel researchers
By Laura Snider Camera Staff Writer
Posted: 08/09/2011 05:18:15 PM MDT

Hungry rains devour clouds in a pattern that’s similar to the way foxes prey on rabbits, according to a new study by a Boulder researcher.

When rabbit populations flourish, the number of foxes also begins to increase. The boom in foxes eventually causes a decline in the number of rabbits, which in turn, results in a decrease in the fox population. This oscillation in predator-prey numbers — with the predator’s peak lagging slightly behind the prey’s peak — is described by a mathematical equation known as the Lotka-Volterra model.

In study published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Graham Feingold, a researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, and Ilan Koren, of the Wiezmann Institute of Science in Israel, showed that the relationship between cloud formation and rain can also be described using the simple predator-prey population model.

“The rabbit population — or in our case, the cloud population — starts to build up,” Feingold said. “At that point the foxes — or the rain — starts to eat the cloud. The cloud will start to dissipate. As soon as the thickness of the cloud has gone down, there’s less food for the rain.”

Cloud formation is a complicated process that scientists have worked for decades to describe. The result is a detailed mathematical model that depends on huge computers to run complex simulations. Applying the predator-prey model allows atmospheric scientists to describe patterns of cloud formation in a much simpler way.

“We’re not saying, ‘Put aside your giant computers; we’re going to use a toy model now,'” Feingold said. “But we can see some underlying simplicity in this very complex system. … We’re trying to explore the possibility that we don’t’ always have to use these huge time-consuming computer simulations.”

For example, a predator-prey type model might allow a cloud model to be more easily incorporated into a larger climate model, which may already be burdened with dense complexities.

Feingold and Koren were struck with the idea of applying the predator-prey model to clouds when they were researching stratocumulus clouds, which form in sheets that are honeycombed with openings, for a study that was published last year in the journal Nature. The pair realized that the rain showers they were observing under the stratocumulus clouds came in predictable oscillations.

“It was sort of strange, but we didn’t make too much of it,” Feingold said. “At that point, we wondered if the cloud was also going through a similar oscillation.”

It was. The cloud was dissipating 10 to 15 minutes behind the rainfall. When the rain stopped, the cloud began to build up again, ultimately causing more rain.

The model applied by Koren and Feingold also takes into account aerosols — suspended particles in the atmosphere — which are critical for clouds to begin forming. Without aerosols, cloud droplets have nothing to cling to. The number of aerosols can also affect the amount of rain that can be produced from a cloud.

The greater the number of aerosols, the more spread out the cloud droplets, which makes it more difficult for the cloud droplets to collide with each other and, eventually, form raindrops.

The inclusion of aerosols in the formula — which essentially represent the food for the rabbit-like clouds — is important because it lets researchers explore how human-produced aerosols may be altering precipitation patterns.

The simplified model may “open new windows into the complex relationships between clouds, rain and aerosols, giving us a more useful view of the big picture and helping us to understand how shifting aerosol levels can lead to different climate patterns,” Koren said in a publication of the Weizmann Institute.

Contact Camera Staff Writer Laura Snider at 303-473-1327 or sniderl@dailycamera.com.

http://www.dailycamera.com/science-environment/ci_18648011?IADID=Search-www.dailycamera.com-www.dailycamera.com


If You Need to Set Vision, Mission and Values, Read on.

visual symbols improve communication

 

Your eyes can engage capabilities of your mind beyond everyday logical reasoning.

You process visual symbols both emotionally and rationally.  The combination gives you the power to clarify and distill issues, focus the collective mind of a group and commit them to action.

You use your spatial reasoning to easily identify connections and relationships. You “see” integration.

Your visual sense connects directly to your intuition and emotional logic.  These are tremendous resources that schools and training programs overlook.  These “instincts” kept our forebears alive in challenging conditions for thousands of years and Metaphor Mapping draws on them to help you resolve complex matters, fast.

You feel a visual symbol’s meaning and relate to it viscerally, outside higher level reasoning.   Your heart may skip when you encounter a threat.

For example, think of a project or other sequential activity as moving along a time-line.  Then, think of that time-line as the flow of a river.  As your project moves down the river, a duck may swim in front of your boat.  That’s a minor annoyance and you remain fully in control of the situation, right?   If around the next bend, a giant crocodile confronts you, that’s a different story.  Your career is mortally threatened and you need to change course.  Place a crocodile symbol in front of someone with whom you don’t communicate well.  He’ll get your message, in a heartbeat!

 

 

 

 

You use words to think every day thought, BUT, visual symbols are the king of communication.

visual symbols improve communication

 

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