I have to admit, I’m a sucker for a good metaphor. A good metaphor just has a way of wrapping things up neatly — and is a great way to start a discussion. I came across a few interesting ones today that I want to share.

First of all, there’s chronic organizational knowledgeitis. You have to really read the post to fully appreciate what Patrick is getting at, but it’s a very apt metaphor for any knowledge organization. Treat the disease, not the symptoms.

The next metaphor is discussion forums as knowledge management’s equivalent of fast food. At the end of the post, Kaye asks what an appropriate metaphor would be for blogs.

I’ll stick with the food metaphor here. A blog is a bit like a cooking show to me (I watch too many cooking shows, so perhaps everything starts to seem like a cooking show after a while). You get to cook and make whatever you want, and you get to do it all beforehand, so that the end product looks more polished than what went into it. But ultimately what sells a cooking show is just as much the person doing the cooking as it is the food they make.

Quotations seem to have a similar effect. So I went digging around for quotations about metaphors, and came across this gem (which I think is entirely relevant to knowledge management as a whole.

“Metaphor is the currency of knowledge. I have spent my life learning incredible amounts of disparate, disconnected, obscure, useless pieces of knowledge, and they have turned out to be, almost all of them, extremely useful.”

This quotation is from The Emperor of Scent, by Chandler Burr, which is about biophysicist Luca Turin’s attempts to decode the sense of smell. While I haven’t read the book, the quotation does serve as a reminder that what is often important in knowledge management is providing context for information — and thus transforming it into knowledge that is valuable to a particular group or individual.

Metaphors do just that — they take the disparate and disconnected (and often ostensibly useless) bits of information we gather together in our work and our lives and they create connections that allow us to frame the unknown within an already-understood context. Thanks to both Patrick and Kaye for demonstrating this great use of metaphors.