I ran across this great commercial for EDS that draws an analogy between the services offered by EDS and cat herding. Read More
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Analogy for Communication
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Bad analogy
So, the question is “Is Ratbert making another bad analogy?” I believe the answer to this question depends on the mapping between the source and target domain.
Quick refresher: “Source domain” refers to the domain/knowledge from which the information is being “imported” so to speak. In the case of the cartoon, the source domain would be knowledge about the aging of good wine.
“Target domain” refers to the domain/knowledge to which the information is imported or the analogy is being drawn. In the cartoon, knowledge of Ratbert is the target domain.
“Mapping” refers to the drawing of correspondences between the source and target domain. In the cartoon, this would involve establishing the ways in which Ratbert is like a fine wine and herein lies the determination of whether this is a good or a bad analogy.
Ratbert is making the correct inference for this particular analogy – that Dogbert is saying that initially Ratbert’s wisdom may be lacking but over time will improve with age.
However, in verifying this inference, Dogbert reveals that there is more to the analogy that meets the eye.
He is probably quite correct in making the statement that the analogy holds to the extent that Ratbert resembles a grape. The crux of the matter is exactly HOW Ratbert resembles the grape.
If the resemblance is confined to the fact that Ratbert is round, covered in a thin skin, and grape-colored, then the analogy falls apart. However, if it is because Ratbert shares some of the structural characteristics with grapes that result in fine wine (thick skin, late to ripen, possessing complex flavors that are only revealed with age), the analogy holds. In other words, analogies succeed, not because of physical similarities between the source and the target domain but because of structural similarities.
For Ratbert’s wisdom to age to perfection with time, the wine analogy would suggest that it would help for him to have a “thick skin” (the better to withstand the ravages of the environment), be “slow to ripen” (play, not take life too seriously, take each stage of life as it comes and gain a range of diverse experiences in the process) and be a complex individual with many facets to his personality and many interests.
The structural mapping between source and target domain is the critical component to the success of an analogy. When the mapping only involves mapping the surface features between domains, you have a useless or even misguided analogy at worst and a trivial analogy at best.
Insight, inferences, problem solutions,and effective communication are all made possible by the structured mapping of correspondences between the source and target domain.
The greater the depth and complexity of the mapping – the better the result. Not an easy task by any means but one well worth the effort.
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How Seagate Technology Re-invented The Company By Studying A Watchmaker
In 1999, Steve Luczo, CEO of Seagate Technology, “faced an epic crisis.”[1]He has already out-sourced large portions of the manufacturing of disc drives to low-labor-cost countries. Seagate was, at the time, the largest private employer in Thailand. But Luzco foresaw that as disc drives become miniaturized, there will come a day when such drives would be too difficult for human hands to assemble. He therefore launched a “factory of the future” initiative with the intent of manufacturing drives with virtually no touch of the human hands.
At the time, it was not clear exactly how such a factory can be designed and built. In the entire disc-drive industry, the paradigmatic manufacturing approach was based on dexterous human hands – it was believed that only humans can have the dexterity and smarts to accommodate disc drives of different sizes and designs.
A reasonable approach to solve this problem would be for Luczo to assign the problem to his research/engineering staff who might take years to develop a viable automation solution. Fortunately, the assignment went to an in-house engineer named Doug DeHaan. DeHaan initiated a series of visits to different leading-edge factories in other industries. One of these was a factory belonging to Seiko, the Japanese watchmaker.
As described in G. Pascal Zachary’s article:
“There, DeHaan’s team saw something startling: Though Seagate’s manufacturing gurus liked to think a disc drive was too delicate for robots to handle, Seiko was making wristwatches–even more delicate–on automated lines. Convinced that full automation could work for Seagate, DeHaan showed top management a film of Seiko’s factory floor as part of his recommendation on how to proceed.
Luczo embraced the Seiko lesson and forged ahead with automation. Today, at Seagate’s factories in Asia, each assembly line pumps out about 20,000 iPod Mini-style drives a day. Five years ago the company’s factories required 600 people on 20 lines to produce that many drives. Now two material handlers and one technician can do the job. And with no humans touching drives as they’re built, there’s less chance for electrostatic shock, a primary cause of defects. Five years ago, out of every 1 million drives Seagate made, 10,000 arrived dead at customers’ doors. Today the dead rate is down to 200 per million. “
In hindsight, the borrowing of ideas from a watchmaker when your problem is how to make a miniature precision machine seems to be very obvious and intuitively simple; where else would one go? In practice, it is not as easy as it sounds. In this case, what allowed DeHaan to have this insight was mainly due to his decision to study how other industries solve such problems. He would not had the idea had he not first allow himself to be open to ideas from a totally different industry. His genius is in this crucial step, purposely going out of his way to study how other industries tackle such issues. For while the automation of the manufacturing of a miniature machine is a never-solved problem in the disc drive industry, it is an already digested problem in the watchmaking industry. The reason is pretty simple, necessity is the mother of invention. The watchmaking industry was forced by need to develop an automation line but the disc drive industry was not, that is, until now. So, what can be perceived as insurmountable difficulties in one industry can be standard practice in another. What is important in this case is the act DeHaan took in reaching out to study other industries.
To do this, he first has to become open to ideas from anywhere, then he has to make a real effort to go out and seek the information, a process that often has a low yield. Finally, he has to accept that what works in another industry can also work in his and be daring enough to propose to his top management such an outlandish idea. But, because it has already been demonstrated to be working in the watchmaking industry, he should have had a much easier time proposing using the same idea for the disc drive industry.
Such is the advantage of using a structured analogy approach.
[1] “Invasion of the Gadget Snatchers”, by G. Pascal Zachary, Business 2.0, p. 49-51, May 2005.
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Classical, Romantic, and Cognitive Views of Creativity
When I was a teaching assistant for my advisor (Dr. Thomas B. Ward), I had the pleasure of experiencing his Cognitive Psychology class lectures. One of my favorite lectures (not surprisingly) was his lecture on Creativity. In this lecture, he discussed three different approaches to the study of creativity: The “Classical” view, the “Romantic” view and the “Cognitive” view.
The “Classical” view assumes that creativity is a product of the divine or the unknowable. It results from inspiration; a flash of “brilliance” provided by God, or a Muse. Those taking this approach to creativity believe that the creator is merely a vessel or conduit for creativity. Consequently, they have little control over the timing or contents of the creative act.
The “Romantic” view assumes that creativity results from special cognitive processes or personality traits possessed by creative individuals. These traits include motivation, persistence in the face of obstacles, and the ability to engage in divergent thinking and/or form remote associations. Though all people possess these processes and traits to a certain degree, creative individuals possess them to a greater extent than “normal” individuals.
The “Cognitive” view of creativity assumes that creativity results from normal cognitive processes (e.g., memory retrieval, conceptual combination, analogy) operating on normal knowledge structures (e.g., concepts, schemas). In fact, the Cognitive view argues that creativity is essential for our ability to function effectively in our environment. Read More
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Insight from a basketball analogy
This is an interesting post on using an analogy to obtain business insight:
http://swni.typepad.com/dispatches/2007/09/a-high-rate-of-.html