Metaphors at work – building multi-agency collaboration
Looking round the room just before the multi-agency workshop began, we could see, hear and feel the differences between the organizations seeking to work together. On the left, the head teachers and deputy heads from the local schools – smartly dressed, slightly aloof and clearly demonstrating that their time was precious. On the right, the chief executive officers from a range of youth organizations – casually dressed, lounging in their seats, chatting and laughing. In between were senior officials from childcare and social care organizations, a mix of formal and informal in dress, manner and approach to the meeting. They were all there because of government priorities: local agencies were failing the most needy local children because their services were not co-ordinated, they didn’t keep each other informed, and tended to be organizationally rather than client focused. Those present recognized the problem, but found it difficult to reconcile the broader picture with the targets and objectives against which they were individually judged.
So how do we, as facilitators, help organisations with such clear differences in culture, priorities and ways of doing things work together to carry out a shared plan of action which is dynamic, empowering and has lasting effect? In our experience, one of the most effective ways is to develop and use the metaphors that different organizations have about each other, about working together and what they want to achieve.
Metaphors and stories are a powerful tool to assist organisations to tap into underlying assumptions within individuals to guide collective action. Parallel to this focus on organisational metaphors, there has been increasing interest in working with personal metaphors in therapeutic and personal development settings. Coaches and therapists use Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) to develop a multi-sensory depth to working with personal metaphors which help support radical and lasting change for individuals. Developed out of this work in NLP and the use of therapeutic metaphor has been an approach to working with ‘clean language’ to make sure that as far as possible the coach or therapist is not ‘contaminating’ the metaphor by imposing their own version on the individual and the group.
One area of overlap between the organisational and individual fields is the use of ‘archetypal’ figures in metaphor and a recognition that some roles in stories and metaphors seem to be universal in their application. Jung gives us the idea of the ‘collective unconscious’ consisting of ‘contents and modes of behavior that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals’. He writes that the contents of the collective unconscious include archetypes which are ‘universal images’ expressed in lore, myth and fairytales. Carol Pearson’s Awakening the heroes within: twelve archetypes to help us find ourselves and transform our world is a helpful distillation of the Jungian archetypes within an overall frame of the ‘Hero’s Journey’. The archetypes – innocent, orphan, warrior, caregiver, lover, seeker, creator, destroyer, magician, jester, ruler, sage - and the story of the hero’s journey are claimed to provide a widely shared basis for communication among people from different backgrounds, organizations and indeed cultures.
We have combined these theoretical insights with our own experience of facilitating collaboration between organizations and different groups using metaphor to develop a five stage process for facilitators which creates multi-sensory depth; uses clean language; and assists the development of archetypes within the metaphor. We have developed and tested this approach through working with different organizations and agencies over the past four years.
There are real benefits to organisations and facilitators of working explicitly with metaphors in a collaborative context.
Wilson Sherriff have developed a five-step process for collecting and using metaphors to assist the development of collaborative relationships.