Dialogic containers and the danger of metaphors

Mike Jackson takes apart three common metaphors that get folks off on the wrong foot when thinking about systems: the elephant, the iceberg and the lever:

When I make the case for eradication of elephants, icebergs and leverage points from the discourse of systems thinking, I am often told that, while these metaphors are simplistic, they do offer beginners an easy route in. I take a contrary view – that it is cruel, disheartening and confusing for novices to be led in the wrong direction and then asked to retrace their steps. There are better ways of introducing systems thinking to beginners.

What other metaphors? For a start, anything that moves, is uncontrollable, is alive and is responsive to conditions.  Over the years have talked about jazz improvisation, the real motion of rivers, a whirlpool, football, weather systems, and many others. useful metaphors need to be relevant to the context, and explain aspects what is trying to be understood – no map of the system can replicate the system, but certain metaphors can help to describe aspects of a system.

I'm writing about dialogic containers these days.  They are tricky to describe, and in the same way that Mike asserts a sophisticated understanding of systems, it's important to find helpful metaphor for a dialogic container.

As facilitators we are used to using the world "container" to describe something that we can sense, feel or even physically see. The term does not convey the nature of an actual thing, but if you ask people what they mean by container you find yourself in a metaphorical world. And also, it feels like a finger pointing at the moon. 

Dialogic containers are important to dialogic organizational development. In the Dialogic Organization Development book there are several metaphors employed by several of my co-authors to describe containers. What I'm finding is that we commonly refer to containers in four distinct ways:

• Container as space. Sometimes a field air an island, a shape like a circle, a bounded space that has an inside and an outside.
• Container as a protective vessel. A cauldron, a refuge, a place of explicit safety from something outside, or managed in a way that safety is developed inside.
• Container as a created structure. Something that practitioners make and hold, something built, staged, arranged or designed. 
• Container as emergent relational phenomenon. A conversation, a relationship building moment, a space that feels different, a special moment, a temporary field for self-organization and the experience of flow.

I have a couple of dozen metaphors form that book alone which serve to illuminate different aspects of the work of the container. These are all legitimate ways we feel and understand "containers" but I think they need to be grounded in something more consistent.  I am moving towards ultimately making an ontological claim about what dialogic containers actually are, based in complexity, as emergent constraint regimes whose constraints originate from the pre-existing structure, the interactions of people in a group and influence of a designer/facilitator/host.  I think it's useful to make this claim because as facilitators this is the territory in which we operate and how we talk and think about it has serious implications for the action we take when we host.  I feel it's important to describe this constraint regime with the design intention as an isolated source of constraint in order to raise the awareness of the practitioner to their consequential role in shaping a container.  

In other words, I've long been troubled with how we talk about facilitation that ideally lets the group do their own work and rely on their own capacity while simultaneously talking about our own role as being responsible for the design, creation and maintenance of the container.

So Mike's call to be very careful with our metaphors matters. That's what I'm unpacking with the book I am working on and the teaching I am doing these days.