Analogies? They're a bit like making love to a beautiful woman!

The “Fast Show's” comic character, Swiss Tony, has one analogy for every eventuality: that of “making love to a beautiful woman”. His one-track mind can twist almost any situation to fit.

Most people are capable of coming up with a wider range of analogies and, in my experience, it's something we human beings can't stop doing. Personally I like the maxim “if an analogy is with pushing, it's worth pushing too far”.

A fun exercise I developed, almost by accident, was the “push the analogy” game. I often have a range of plastic or wooden animals arranged in the training room in order to generate a state of curiosity amongst the learners (curiosity being an appropriate state to learn in). When asked what are they for I normally promise “I'll tell you later” which heightens and lengthens the curiosity. One group, when told towards the end of the course that the animals were just there to create curiosity, refused to believe me. They insisted I must have an exercise planned using them but had run out of time.

I hate to disappoint a group, so I got the group to take the animal that had been at their place and tell a partner how it was “like Coaching Skills” (the subject of the course). They then had to change partners and come up with either a different analogy or an extension of the first one. The group had great fun and generated some cracking analogies. Towards the end they really had to work hard to contrive some kind of connection and I was quite surprised how much they had to get into the detail of the workshop to find inspiration.

Example: Coaching is like this cow because:

“It provides the basis of a strong (bone) structure for career and life”

“It allows space and time for the client to ruminate, and get every
ounce of value out of a learning experience”

“Sometimes, issues ARE black and white”

“It shows there are always udder options”

Analogies and metaphors work well as learning devices because they play to that most basic human need - the need to make meaning. Stretching this device is great fun and causes the learner to both to exercise their creative muscles and review the material studied.

APPLICATIONS

• As a review exercise get small groups to come up with new analogies for the skills and principles being learned. Then get the other groups to push those analogies “too far” - you can even award points

• If you are in an interesting location, send the learners out to find an object which for them is analagous to the most important learnings to them. If possible bring it into the room or take an instamatic picture of it. Each individual can then explain their item and its associations. Finally, take a photograph of the assembled items and distribute to the group as a kind of 3D mindmap of their experience

• Where analogies are being developed spontaneously and perhaps unhelpfully, get the group to develop those further and find out what is good about their situation using the analogy.

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