I once worked with someone who didn’t like analogies. He favored precision, a bias common among technical people. Perhaps unwittingly, he continued to use analogies in conversation but employed them poorly, as one does with a tool one fails to understand. I think his dislike of analogies came from their misuse and overextension. However, there are a few scenarios where analogies can be particularly effective:
Bootstrap Intuition
When onboarding a new team member, you want to bootstrap their understanding. You can either speak in the jargon of your specialty and expect them to do their own research, which will be time-consuming and error prone, or you can give them a mental model based on what they probably already know. Analogies transfer intuition from a known domain to new one. While all analogies have limits, you can use them as a bridge to cross the initial chasm, and burn after crossing.
Reframe Your Perspective
You want to reframe the way people understand an important but commonly misunderstood issue. Because they are brief and loaded with existing connotations, analogies can help trigger a shift in paradigm, a change of perspective. And that can be useful, because, as Alan Kay said, "A change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points."* I'd pay a lot for an extra 80 IQ points, even if they are figurative and bound by a specific problem. Using analogies to achieve this seems like a bargain.
Consider this analogy for startup founders: "Fund-raising is event management." How is this true, and why is it useful? Many founders approach fundraising slowly, meeting investors one by one over several months. They believe they are systematically working through potential investors. However, "fundraising is event management" suggests they should engage many investors quickly. Group dynamics affect investors—the more interest one shows, the more others will follow. Like a well-managed event, you want a line of interested people at the door and for others to see that line. YC's pre-COVID in-person demo days exemplified this structured excitement. Poor fundraising is like a poorly attended event: one person arrives, sees no one else, leaves … and soon word spreads. Effective fundraising leverages group dynamics and FOMO to create a buzz.
Here are two other tech-related analogies:
Product-market fit isn’t a destination, it’s a bucking bronco.
Every successful technology is a social movement.
These analogies address common misperceptions about PMF and product, respectively. These might be rephrased as:
When you achieve PMF, you’re work has just begun. PMF can be lost as well as gained.
Your product only exists as a component in a greater system with the human user, and those users act in groups to adopt new technologies. Therefore, you should focus on the users and how they adopt tech and interact with each other around that adoption.
And finally, consider this quote from a zoo director after a notorious tiger attack in Vegas:
“A wild animal's like a loaded gun, it can go off at any time.”
If that’s not a great reframe about life with big cats, I don’t know what is.
Accelerate Problem-Solving
To tackle an unfamiliar problem, you need a way in. Even highly technical people, like the esteemed mathematician George Polya, appreciate analogies in this context. Polya came to America as one of The Martians, and taught at Stanford for many years. In his excellent problem-solving handbook "How to Solve It", he included an entry on Analogy:
"Analogy is a sort of similarity. Similar objects agree with each other in some respect, analogous objects agree in certain relations of their respective parts.... Analogy pervades all our thinking, our everyday speech and our trivial conclusions as well as artistic ways of expression and the highest scientific achievements. Analogy is used on very different levels. People often use vague, ambiguous, incomplete, or incompletely clarified analogies, but analogy may reach the level of mathematical precision. All sorts of analogy may play a role in the discovery of the solution and so we should not neglect any sort. We may consider ourselves lucky when, trying to solve a problem, we succeed in discovering a simpler analogous problem."
In the book’s early exercises, Polya shows how to apply intuitions from planar (2D) to solid (3D) geometry by analogy.
Categorize Anything at All
A kind reader pointed me to this essay by Douglas Hofstadter, where he argues that analogy is the core of cognition. So the plot twist in a post claiming that analogies have a few great use cases is that, in fact, what we do when we think is analogize. Consider the Concept, the application of a single word to cover many concrete and separate instances — for example, the word “dog”, which encompasses all individual dogs in the species. The mechanics of Concept imply that each of these individual animals is similar enough to the others to merit being put in the same bucket: dog. That is, it analogizes across four-legged mammalian instantiations and asserts that a subset of similarities called dog are usefully distinct, that each one is like the others. Hofstadter argues that we only categorize by analogy, and analogies enable us to eat complexity, to skate over trivial differences as needed in order to think towards something more important. To take it a step further, even establishing an identity over time and call teenage you the same as grownup you is a form of analogy, because you are not the same, and all your cells get replaced like a biological ship of Theseus, and yet we call you you.
Plato thought his ideals existed on some metaphysical plane, when in fact they were abstractions manufactured in his mind (still useful, though!). Ancient Greeks believed that our eyes beamed particles that hit objects and returned their traces to us, when in fact our minds broadcast concepts at the world, which intercept and co-opt the raw data entering our senses, shaping our perception.
The Limits of Analogy
Of course, analogies have their drawbacks. Sometimes we commit category errors. They can be incorrect or extended beyond their usefulness. For example, the analogy "Fundraising is event management" doesn't mean you should hire caterers and a photographer or send out RSVPs. That would be taking a figure of speech too far. But just because a tool can be misused doesn’t mean it’s useless. In fact, the opposite is true: their misuse is an indication of their power. You might even say an analogy is like a loaded gun.
* For more context on the Alan Kay quote, here is the author himself.
** Bonus Hofstadter video here.
** For a discussion of the conceptual mileage and baggage generated by analogies, see: “Analogies for modeling belief dynamics”, Cell, 2024.