8 April

Metaphors shape how we understand and act in the world. The overwhelmingly dominant metaphor for organisations and society is the ‘top and bottom’ metaphor. Leaders are at the top, everybody else is at the bottom, and actions flow ‘top-down’ or ‘bottom-up’. Phase diagrams like this one are a much better metaphor, I think. You can see here, it’s all water. But it changes phase depending on conditions. That’s how organisations and societies work too. It’s all us, what we call leaders and top and bottom are just different phases of us. There is no top and bottom.