"Using metaphors in IT training"

The visit

I recently went to visit one of the managers in the hospital where I work as an IT trainer. The manager had taken delivery of a new PC (running Windows 3.1) and wanted to know how to organise all the files. "Ha haaa!" I thought as I walked the corridors to the offices, "this is easy, just use the old - 'well it's like a filing cabinet' - analogy".

Most trainers, in IT and other areas, use or have used metaphors and analogies to try and get across a learning point. But how often has the metaphor been met with a blank stare, with the learners thinking "I don't get it"? Isn't that just so frustrating? You use your best metaphor, and it falls on deaf ears. What can be done to make sure that they do "get it"? What else can a trainer do to make sure that the learner does actually learn? How can you guarantee that the metaphors you use will make sense?

I had recently been talking to another IT trainer, who claimed that she couldn't understand the problem. "But I used a metaphor and they still didn't get it!" she said, as though the simple act of handing over a metaphor would guarantee success.

Try something new

I talked more with this trainer, and I was suddenly struck by how often she used the word "I". Her entire emphasis was on what she did, and almost no emphasis was placed on what the learners were doing. I quizzed her on this.

"But all they're doing is thinking, and I can't change what they're thinking" was her reply.

But if a metaphor doesn't alter what someone is thinking, what does it do?

My thoughts came back to my imminent appointment with the manager and to a recent and powerful experience I had had. Only a few weeks before I had attended the first weekend of a two weekend workshop on Grovian metaphor therapy. The emphasis of David Groves' metaphor work is on using the metaphors given by the client, without interpretation and without the therapist imposing any new metaphors. The therapist guides the client through developing the metaphor until they discover new resources and come to a resolution or a solution to the "problem".

What's it like?

Throughout the weekend I had wondered how this could be applied to training. My subsequent experiences in using metaphors in training had been enlightening to say the least, and I was ready to try something new this time.

The basic shift in approach was this - instead of using a metaphor that I create, I would ask the learner for a metaphor of their own. How would they know what metaphor to create? Because the set-up is very important and when it is set-up in the right way the learner almost always comes up with a useable metaphor of their own.

There is a presupposition in NLP that "everyone already has all the resources they need", and here was a beautiful illustration of that presupposition in action. When a learner produces their own metaphor they have already given an example of something they understand and are familiar with, the demonstration given later will illustrate this.

Once the trainer has a suitable metaphor from the learner it is then a matter of coaching the learner to explore that metaphor, expand it, and identify how and where the metaphor relates to the what is being explained. This requires three things from the trainer:

a specific outcome, a clear idea of what is being explained and how the learner's metaphor will develop to achieve the learning outcome
the awareness to know whether or not the learners' metaphor is evolving and expanding in the right direction (to know the right direction presupposes a clearly identified outcome)
the flexibility to change when the current approach isn't working.

It would be courting disaster to drive in a straight line from one town to another, most of us have to navigate bends, traffic lights and other traffic, continually adjusting our driving to take account of the changing road and traffic conditions.

But some trainers seem to train in a straight line, they're going to stick to their script no matter what the learner says. Their aim is simply to deliver the material as it's written, or as they've planned it. That is their outcome. It's not my outcome. My outcome is to navigate the learner to a new state of understanding, and the territory I am navigating is their own metaphorical landscape.

Mud and filing cabinets

"What's it like, learning about the computer?" I had asked a recent member of staff on a basic computer training course.

"It's as clear as mud" she replied.

"And what kind of mud is that mud, when it's as clear as mud?" was my next question.

She thought for a moment, went inside, did loads of processing (I presume), and said "actually it's getting clearer."

I decided to leave it there, all the participants had been gaining in confidence and skill throughout the morning. The question "and what kind of X is that X" is a so called 'clean' question from Grovian metaphor therapy. It encourages the client to explore their own metaphor, without introducing any of the therapists' or trainers' metaphor.

Whether I understood her metaphor or not was completely irrelevant, that she understood better was completely relevant. Metaphors are what people think, and skilful questioning can most definitely change what people think. The next stage is to help a learner to evolve their metaphor and then to shift it so that it relates directly to what is being learned. The questions used to achieve this are not 'clean', they are highly directional and deliberately introduce lots of new things - but then that's half the object of training (in my opinion).

Using the metaphors

I sat down with the manager, who had the new PC, and started to find out about what they wanted to cover in the half hour we had available. He explained how he had been writing documents in the word-processor and had been saving them all in the same directory. He now wanted to be able to save letters in one directory, reports in another and so on.

This discussion set the frame for what we would cover, since we were both focused on this whatever I said would be related by the learner back to the subject of organising files on the computer.

I then went on to explain that just as important as knowing which keys to press on the keyboard was having an effective mental model of how the computer organised it's information. "If you've got a good idea of how your secretary files things you're more likely to be able to find something, aren't you?" I asked, to which the manager agreed.

Now I've introduced the idea of talking in metaphor and exploring mental models rather than just a demonstration of which keys to press. Now to elicit the client generated metaphor.

"Can you give me an example of how you organise information in your office?" I asked. A fairly safe question, since we were sitting in the manager's office with paper strewn over the desk next to which were two filing cabinets.

He then explained how different files were organised in different drawers, and papers were arranged in folders. I kept asking questions such as "and what's that like..." and "what kind of (folder) is that?" to encourage an expansion of and an exploration of their own metaphor. These questions are taken straight from Grovian metaphor therapy - but he wasn't to know that.

We then turned to the computer screen, where the computers filing program (called File Manager) was running.

"File Manager organises its information in an almost identical way to you" I said. I had set up the context in which I could simply illustrate how the computer operated in a way which was already familiar. This, in my opinion, is where many metaphor users fall down. Simply claiming that "this" is like "that" can leave the learner with the unanswered question - "how is this like that?", the equivalence might not be obvious.

I then proceeded to relate the files in the filing cabinet to the files on the screen, the folders in the filing cabinet to the folders/directories on the screen and filing cabinets themselves to the different disk drives.

I then asked the manager how he might go about arranging and organising files, moving them and remembering how which file is where. At each stage, the filing cabinet its contents and the actions were related one to one to their computer equivalents. In technical terms this is maintaining the isomorphism of the metaphor, each element in the metaphor is mapped onto each element in the material being taught.

There are two impulses to avoid whilst working with client generated metaphors. Having been asked a question the learner may well take some time to explore their own thoughts, the temptation can be to interrupt in order to hurry things along. Resist! Learning will take at one speed - the learners' speed.

Experts love to show off their expertise and the second impulse is to expand the explanation and bring in other items. It can be tempting when explaining the computers' filing system to add in an observation about file allocation tables. Resist! Any addition will compromise the isomorphism, or in non-technical terms will simply serve to confuse the learner.

The focus throughout the session was on what the learner was doing in his head, in tracking his responses and developing his metaphor to match the computer.

And is there anything else?

How can the learner not "get it"? It's their metaphor and they develop it. I've had some great results, it certainly seems to be an approach that is more "user friendly" than simply handing over a pre-packaged metaphor.

The outcome, the set-up, the elicitation, tracking and mapping the isomorphism and the clean language approach of Grovian metaphor therapy are the bits and pieces of training utilising client generated metaphors . It's a start, but only the start. So far I've used it for IT training with people who have already had at least a little exposure to the computer and the results have been most encouraging.

It's not a brand new approach, it's an extension of many approaches, but as Aristotle said "the greatest thing by far is to be the master of metaphor".