Episode 202: All in the mind: how personal metaphors shape your work and life – with Bill Aronson

Episode 202: All in the mind: how personal metaphors shape your work and life - with Bill Aronson

Jeremy Cline [00:00:00]:
What's your metaphor for life? Is life a struggle made up of a series of battles to be won or lost? Is life a journey where journey's end is the measure of success? And what impact does your own personal life metaphor have on the way you operate in the world? How does it affect your actions, your decisions, your interactions with others? That's what we're going to be talking about in this week's episode. I'm Jeremy Cline, and this is Change Work Life. Hello, and welcome to Change Work Life, the show that's all about beating the Sunday evening blues and enjoying Mondays again. I'm a career coach, and in each episode, my guests and I bring you tips, strategies and stories to help you enjoy a more satisfying and fulfilling working life. How can two people who outwardly appear very similar, same kind of work, same kind of lifestyle, have such radically different outlooks on life? What makes one see life as a battle to be won, whilst the other sees a journey, perhaps one without a fixed destination? How do our own personal metaphors for life affect us, whether in the decisions we make or in our relationships with others? And do these metaphors help us? If not, what can we do about it? To explore this topic, I'm joined this week by Bill Aronson. Bill is a COO and CFO, an author of eight books and an expert in bridging the gap between technology and business. Bill, welcome to the podcast.

Bill Aronson [00:01:46]:
Thank you very much, Jeremy. Thank you for having me on.

Jeremy Cline [00:01:49]:
I've not really done your CV much justice in that rather short introduction, but rather than get into the weeds of your career, what would you like the audience to know about you, to set the context of why you and I are having this conversation about metaphor?

Bill Aronson [00:02:04]:
Well, I'm not going to go into my cv. Anyone can Google me if they're interested. I actually think that what we're, what we're about to do, what we'll do in the future, is far more interesting than what we might have done in the past. I. I certainly feel that about my life at the moment. I'm really excited about my future, but one of the things that I've learned along the way and I want to share is the importance of metaphor and how metaphor actually really shapes the way you see the world. And so if out of this interview, people are touched and inspired to go off and find out more about metaphor and how it applies to them, then I think it'll be valuable.

Jeremy Cline [00:02:49]:
So, you said that this is one of the things that you've learned in your career. Can you just give us a little bit of insight into how that knowledge arose?

Bill Aronson [00:02:59]:
I think, like many people are always looking for new information, new ideas, new concepts, new perspectives. I was fortunate enough to go on a weekend workshop with Penny, Penny Tompkins and James Lawley, who are experts in the field of metaphor. And at the end I will certainly give you some details of some of the books that they've written. So I was really, I had my eyes opened by, by going on their courses and it's really influenced a lot of the way that I think about the world ever since. And they, of course, were not the beginnings of this. There's a guy called David Grove who is actually probably the modern inventor of really looking at metaphor. And I can explain a little bit about the story about how that came about, if you're interested.

Jeremy Cline [00:03:52]:
Well, let's start with, how do metaphors help us understand our place in the world?

Bill Aronson [00:03:59]:
You just used a metaphor there, didn't you? You said, how do metaphors shape or help us in our place in the world? So, you're not talking about a physical place, you're talking about a metaphorical place. I want to go back and just start with a really fundamental question, which I'll ask you, and then we can go from there. Because I think it's a basis, a lot of the conversation is going to flow from it. The question is this: why do humans have a brain?

Jeremy Cline [00:04:34]:
There's all sorts of answers going through my mind, but your question was why, and the only answer I can come to why is because humans evolved that way.

Bill Aronson [00:04:46]:
Right. Well, if you think about all the life forms on the planet, most life forms on this planet do not have a brain. And there's a whole class of life forms which do. And if you imagine a stadium, and all the life forms which didn't have a brain were on one side, and all the ones which did were on the other side, I think you'd begin to see the difference. So, on one side, you would have trees, you'd have grasses, you'd have all kinds of things which essentially don't move. And on the other side; you have all the animals, the birds, the fish, the humans, and the thing which is common to them all is that they move. So, I would say that the reason why we have a brain and why we've evolved a brain is because we move, and movement through three-dimensional space is an extremely complex thing to do. And so, you need a brain to be able to do that. So, you need senses, you need to be able to sense the world, both visually, auditory, and we have at least five senses, probably more, but you need those senses to be able to understand the world that you're trying to navigate, and then from there, you need to develop a memory system because it's going to be much more efficient if you know that if you go in this particular direction, there's food, and in that direction, there's danger. If you can memorise that information, then you're going to be much more efficient and less likely to go down a dangerous path. And then, you can start to have language, you can start to communicate to the rest of the tribe, to your children, 'Don't go this way, go this way.' So, if you think about the fundamental basis for having a brain, it is around dealing with this very complex problem, which people who try and design robots know it's a very, very hard problem to solve, but we have solved it over millennia. And if you look at what that means, of you look at where's the largest part of our brain, the largest part of our brain is visual. That makes sense, we primarily use vision to navigate through three-dimensional space. And so, it's not such a jump to realise that when we're creating language, that language is going to be visual. And from there you begin to see that metaphor is not some thrill which we use to embellish a description, it is actually a foundation of language. I would go as far as to say that you simply cannot communicate anything to anyone without metaphor. You can take any paragraph of any book and just go through it and remove all the metaphors in that, and you will find that you're left with just garbage. It would be meaningless, it would just be 'these', 'ons' and 'ands'. So, metaphor is absolutely critical to the way that we understand the world. Because we don't actually live in the real world. We think we do, but we don't. We live in this mental construct which is a combination of memory and experience and the visual and the auditory and all the other sense that are coming in, and we construct an image of the world, it's a representation of the world, and then we make decisions based on that representation. We interpret the world, but we don't actually experience it. Scientists who look at the way humans are, I mean, you're flooded with senses, flooded with information, there's no way that you can possibly cope with it, and your senses are absolutely assaulted with information coming in from the outside world. So, mostly what we're doing is we're filtering. We're filtering it down to something which is a simpler version of reality, and then we're making decisions based on that. And I'm sure you're well aware of the YouTube video of the gorilla. You have two basketball teams, there's a white team and the black team, and you're told, 'Focus on how many times the white team passed the ball to each other.' And you have to really concentrate, because they're going to do it quite a few times. You've really got to focus. And you really focus, and fantastic, they did 15 times. Yes, but did you notice the gorilla walking across the stage, waiving at you, and then walking off? Most people will miss it. They absolutely miss it. I remember when I saw it the first time, I was in a conference, and there was maybe 300 people there. And I was sitting right near the front. And I saw the gorilla go past, just for a moment, just for a fraction of a second, and I literally heard my brain go, 'That's not possible. I'm focusing on this basketball.' So, it's incredibly important, the metaphorical landscape that we create about the world, because that's our reality, of course.

Jeremy Cline [00:10:23]:
Okay. And I do remember that YouTube video, actually. And I remember counting the number of passes very diligently and then it going, 'Did you see the gorilla?' And I was like, 'What gorilla? No, I genuinely don't remember that at all.' Okay, so if I've understood what you're saying, then metaphor comes out of the fact that we rely so much on the visual that we've kind of created, or we need metaphor, it's come out of our visual element, and we need it in order to make sense of the fact that we rely so much on the visual element. Is that a fair summary?

Bill Aronson [00:11:04]:
It doesn't have to be limited to visual, but a lot of metaphors are visual. But I mean, metaphors will relate to all the different senses. So, I mean, let's just talk a little bit about definitions, as there's metaphors as similes and analogies. And they're all related to each other. And the difference is, of course, a metaphor says something is something else. Whereas a simile says something is like something else. And an analogy is usually much more detailed. So, if you think of it in terms of head, heart and gut, the analogies would tend to be the head. We're going to use them, for example, to say, a cell is like a factory. And inside the factory, you have workers, and you have assembly lines, and you have quality control. So, that's the kind of way that, quite often within an analogy, you will have similes, and you will also have metaphors as subs of the analogy. The simile is more poetic. My love is like a red, red rose. It isn't a red, red rose, but it's like a red, red rose. You're creating a poetic expression to explain something. A metaphor is much more direct. It's more gut-like. Juliet is the sun. Not like the sun. She is the sun. When Romeo is talking about Juliet, he describes in four words, Juliet is the sun. And you completely understand that she is the centre of his universe, he's totally enthralled by her. In four words. So, metaphors are incredibly valuable to express complex ideas in very limited ways. I'll give you an example of this. A few years ago, I was scrolling through, reading news, and there was this article about something going on with scientists in Scotland, and it was very complex. And I never got beyond the headline. I couldn't see a point of clicking into that story. Until I saw a headline which said 'Loch Ness is a spirit level'. And what they'd done, scientists, basically, what they've done is, they had put sensors at one end of Loch Ness and the other end of Loch Ness. And as you know, Loch Ness is sort of north-south, it's a very long, thin lake. And from measuring the movement of those two sensors, they could actually tell that the whole of Great Britain was actually moving. The whole of Great Britain was moving. But I would never have read that article unless they had provided that metaphor. And I go, 'Aha, I understand what you're talking about.' So, one of the things that metaphors do is, they make the unfamiliar familiar. They make something that you do not know anything at all about understandable, by anchoring it with something that you do understand. And conversely, they make the everyday, the banal, the ordinary, very strange, very peculiar. So, they change your perspective. They really change your perspective. I could keep talking if you want, but you interrupt me every now and then, ask me questions.

Jeremy Cline [00:14:54]:
So, we talked a lot about metaphor in terms of aiding understanding and interpretation. But what about in terms of influence? What about in terms of affecting the way we act, the decision we choose, or the way we interact with someone?

Bill Aronson [00:15:14]:
Okay. So, it's used across all language. And if you have the right metaphor, as that example, it was the right metaphor to describe something, and I clicked in, because I understood the spirit level analogy, it actually will influence people. And think about the recent elections in America. What was Trump's phrase? Drain the swamp. What's being drained? What swamp are we talking about? The people that he was speaking to understood that phrase, resonated with that phrase and voted for him. So, getting the right metaphor is incredibly important. Incredibly important. Now, in the research that I've done, what I've seen is, you can look at the way someone lives their life, and you can boil it down to three metaphors. And in the first metaphor, which I think you alluded to at the beginning of this conversation, you could say that the overarching metaphor which influences every decision that they make, every way they understand the world, is that life is a struggle, life is a battle. Now, if that's your overarching metaphor, if that's the way you perceive the world, everything which happens to you is going to be filtered through that. You meet somebody new. Are they friend or foe? Are they on your side, or are they against you? Because if you're in a battle, if you're in a war, you don't care about anyone in between. All you care about is, are they on my side, or are they against me? And you're probably going to be extremely suspicious. You're always going to assume that someone is trying to trick you or shaft you or manipulate you. And so, you are going to talk and convey and communicate in that way. And what's going to happen? Guess what's going to happen. The other person is going to pick up on that. Well, that's the dance you want to play. Sure, that's the dance I play. But it's very limited. Yeah, it's very limited.

Jeremy Cline [00:17:36]:
Okay, so what's the second metaphor?

Bill Aronson [00:17:39]:
Life is a journey. Now, 'life is a journey' encompasses 'life is a battle'. There will be battles along the way, there will be struggles along the way, but you will get through them. You will overcome those difficulties that you face. You overcome the challenges that you face. Because you're on a journey. You're on a journey of discovery, a self-discovery, of self-awareness. That journey could be a spiritual journey, it could be a career journey. I'm on my journey, I want to make it to CEO by the time I'm 45. And to do that, I need to do this, I need to do that, I need to do that. And I'm going to have difficulties with this person. I know I'm going to have to work around them. But you're on a journey, and you know that you're on a journey, and success is journey's end.

Jeremy Cline [00:18:34]:
So, it's a journey with a destination potentially.

Bill Aronson [00:18:36]:
Every journey has a destination. Yes.

Jeremy Cline [00:18:40]:
Okay. And so, what's the third one?

Bill Aronson [00:18:44]:
Well, if we just talk about those two first, I mean, if you look at the language of people from poor socio-economic backgrounds, you will hear much more that struggle language. In Australia, they talk about Aussie battlers. If you look at the journey language, you will see it's more the people who are from a middle-class background. Once you reach a point where you're financially secure or reasonably secure, or you can see that you're going to become secure, your language will change. It will become more like that. Now there's an interesting question. Clearly, the environment that you're brought up in will influence how you feel, the culture that you're part of. But if you were to consciously change your language from battle language to journey language, would that actually change your reality? That, I think, is something which is worth exploring. The third one, and of course, there may be more, but the third one is that life is neither a journey nor a battle. It's just now. Life is just now. And sometimes the now feels like a journey, and sometimes the now feels like a battle. There is no past, there is no future. There's just this glorious moment of nowness which just keeps nowing along. And so, you have a very different way of viewing the world. There's another way that you could look at this. You can look at it in terms of sex, love and compassion. So, those are the three major drivers and influences of our behaviour. So, if you're driven by sex, then you're purely focused on your need, and you can just use another person for your need. If it's around love, it's more around relationships. If it's around compassion, you give, not with any intention of getting anything in return. You just overflow. You just overflow. Now, if you accept that's the way that we as individuals behave with each other, when we come together and form organisations, we must create organisations which are reflections of ourselves. So, you would then see that we don't use this language, but if you look at it, you can see that most organisations are sexual. They are transactional, they are profit-focused, they are product focused, they don't actually care about their customers, they do not care about their suppliers, they do not care about their staff. If you can't do the job, goodbye, we'll get somebody else. So, those organisations are not going to care about the planet, they're not going to care about the environment, and they're just going to do what they do, because that's their focus. Ultimately, it comes down to, 'I want more money, I want more power, I want more control.' Organisations which move away from that, who become more loving organisations, start to actually engage and have genuine, not marketing guff, but genuine interest in their staff, in their customers, in their suppliers. And they're actually much more concerned about relationships than transactions. And they look to build long-term relationships. Surprisingly, those organisations usually last longer. Remember, 80% of most businesses fail within 12 months. Those who last longer, they're actually usually more productive, and they're certainly much nicer places to work in.

Jeremy Cline [00:22:54]:
So, do these fit in with the analogies you were talking earlier? So, with the, I don't know, typical, for want of a better word, organisation which doesn't really care anything about profit, would that fall more into the life is a struggle, life is a battle analogy, whilst the more caring one is more the life is a journey one?

Bill Aronson [00:23:14]:
Yes, there's an interesting overlap. Starting to see those overlaps.

Jeremy Cline [00:23:18]:
So, when could an organisation become a life is now? What would that look like in commercial organisational terms?

Bill Aronson [00:23:29]:
A compassionate organisation, they're quite rare. But they do exist. And they can tend to be not-for-profits, they don't have to be not-for-profits. So, there can be organisations which have a mission which is way higher than making a profit or delivering a product or a service. Their focus is much more now-based than that. Which is not to say that they are not, they can be quite tough. Those organisations can be quite tough, because they're very clear about what it is that they're trying to do. I would say, for example, a common, modern one would be Maya Paabo and what she's trying to do in Suriname. She's putting her name forward to be the president of Suriname. Why? Because she really, really cares about the country. She is personally putting her life on the line to do so. Her father was murdered. This is not a safe place. But she cares so much about the country, she just feels she has to do what she's doing.

Jeremy Cline [00:24:44]:
So, there's almost a limit of altruism here in the now metaphor.

Bill Aronson [00:24:55]:
Yes, I would say that, because your ego is no longer making the decisions as to what you do.

Jeremy Cline [00:25:04]:
All right. So, I'm guessing that these metaphors might help us in terms of a bias. I'm guessing that very few people, and possibly very few organisations, are going to be entirely in one camp or the other. And so, it's a question of whether, you said that journey encompasses struggle and battle, so whether it's mainly struggle or battle, or whether it's mainly journey, then that might affect your outlook.

Bill Aronson [00:25:41]:
Yes, clearly. And I mean, I'm talking in absolutes to make a point. The real world is obviously much more messy, and you will have different aspects within the same organisation. You will have people who want control. And you'll have people who are actually very compassionate and caring and doing things out of abundance. Usually, what will happen is, over time, the culture of an organisation will determine what happens. So, if it's a loving organisation, it'll attract people who want to be in a loving organisation, and it will repel people who don't. And the same, if you must have experienced going into those kinds of battle organisations, and you just go, 'Nah, I'm walking out the door. This is not for me.' You know within not even 10 minutes, you will know if you've made a dreadful mistake and you're in the wrong place.

Jeremy Cline [00:26:43]:
And when it comes to personal metaphor, I mean, are we putting these on a scale of desirability? I mean, is it objectively better to be a journey mentality than a struggle mentality? Is it objectively better to be the now mentality, rather than the other two?

Bill Aronson [00:27:03]:
I have my own opinion about that, but I think it's just my opinion. I think the thing to do is, if you find these analogies and these metaphors interesting and useful, then apply it and play with it. Understand where it is. Because if you are unaware of something, then it has an impact on you and has an influence on you. If you become aware of it, then, of course, you can then make choices. So, it's really a question about increasing your possibilities and the choices.

Jeremy Cline [00:27:37]:
And they needn't be mutually exclusive either, need they be? I mean, that everyone is going to be in a point in their life where there is some kind of struggle. So, maybe it's just a really busy day, and you can't wait to get to six o'clock and put your feet up for a bit. Or it might be that your personal circumstances are such that you are a bit worried about where the money's going to come from to pay the bills or that kind of thing.

Bill Aronson [00:28:10]:
Yes, absolutely. I think perhaps, let's just look at a specific metaphor and then start to understand its value. So, let's take this metaphor, which is a struggle metaphor, 'I'm banging my head against a brick wall'. So, in that phrase, there's one word in there which appears to be unimportant, but actually is critical. So, I mean, if you listen to that phrase, 'banging my head against the brick wall', what are the words which are going to spring out? What are the most important words did you hear?

Jeremy Cline [00:28:53]:
Brick wall is quite important.

Bill Aronson [00:28:55]:
Yes.

Jeremy Cline [00:28:56]:
That really brings the metaphor to life, because it's this hard, immovable object.

Bill Aronson [00:29:02]:
Yes.

Jeremy Cline [00:29:04]:
I suppose the banging part, that suggests doing something repetitively without yielding a result.

Bill Aronson [00:29:12]:
Yeah.

Jeremy Cline [00:29:12]:
And then, the my head, then that kind of makes it the personal bit. So, I think I've kind of dissected the whole sentence there.

Bill Aronson [00:29:20]:
Absolutely. Banging, head, brick wall. And the words which we pick up and we listen for tend to be the verbs and the nouns. Those are the key parts of a sentence. And then, we have the adverbs and the adjectives which add colour and shape and form. So, it's not a plastic wall, it's a brick wall, as you say, a very strong, solid wall. And you weren't banging your elbow against a brick wall, you were banging your head. So, it's going to hurt, it's going to give you a headache. So, it's a very simple way of expressing that frustration that you feel stuck, you can't get around something. But the word which appears to be invisible and never gets mentioned is the word 'against'. And if you think about it, if you said you were banging your head near a brick wall, it would make no sense at all, would it? I mean, it would be ridiculous. Or banging my head above the brick wall. So, prepositions, coming back to this metaphorical landscape that we built, we do not live in the real world, let's be clear about that, we don't, and we have these images and sounds and smells and tastes and touch. Inside our brain is just blob of grey matter sitting encased inside a shell. It has no senses at all. It totally depends on these senses to which it's connected. These words, prepositions, there's only around about 150 in the English language, and they've hardly changed in centuries. Whereas the English language has increased and keeps increasing in size, more and more nouns, more and more verbs, mostly in popular culture and in science, there's always creating new words to describe things and to describe movements and actions and so forth. But hidden away are these tiny little words, like against. Preposition is the way we pronounce it, but it's more like pre-position. So, what do these 150 words do? They basically provide us with an understanding of time, an understanding of space, understanding of direction. So, in, out, beyond, above, below, beneath, these are all prepositions. So, the construction kit for your sentences, which enables you to have that three dimensional and then when you add in time, four dimensional, now it's not just a static image you've created, but it's a moving image, it's a video image that you created. Now, why is this important? It's important because, for example, many people talk about freedom. I want freedom. But freedom to, or freedom from? It's fundamentally different. Fundamentally different. If you want freedom from something, you are including it in your metaphorical landscape. You haven't got away from it. You may have got some distance away from it, but it's still there, it's still lurking, it's still influencing you. Where freedom to, completely different. Whatever that problem, whatever that challenge, whatever that issue has disappeared. It's not part of your landscape.

Jeremy Cline [00:32:52]:
Those could be used to describe the same thing, couldn't they? So, you could say, 'I'd like freedom from the nine-to-five', or you could say, 'I'd like freedom to work my own hours', which practically might be saying the same thing, but it's a bit of a difference.

Bill Aronson [00:33:08]:
It's not saying the same thing. Because when you say freedom to work my own hours, what happened to nine-to-five? It's not in the sentence. It's gone. Coming back to what I mentioned, James Lawley and Penny Tompkins at the very beginning, I just wanted to give you a little bit of background of where this work came from. This is not me. I haven't invented this. I'm just passing it on to the next people. So, David Grove was a psychotherapist based in New Zealand, and he was working with children who had had traumatic events happen in their lives. Maybe they had been physically abused or sexually abused, or something awful had happened to them. So, these kids would come to him. And like all good psychotherapists, he's trying to get them to talk about the problem. They were cleverer than him. And instead of talking about the problem, they would always slip off into metaphor. 'I felt like I was in quicksand'. They would not describe this specific event which had happened to them. And every time he tried to get them to do so, they would slide off into metaphor. They would give a metaphorical explanation of what it was, but actually talking about the event itself. And then one day he had an insight. He said, 'I wonder what would happen if instead of trying to pull them away from the metaphor, I actually allowed them to go with it.' And so, he developed over many years a series of questions that you can ask, which don't influence or as little influence as possible when you're talking to somebody else. What you're trying to do is to get them to express their metaphorical landscape, understand their metaphorical landscape, and when you do, it comes active. That model of the world that you have starts to change shape and pulse and form and disappear and dissolve. So, he developed a model, very simple model, which is applied now across business, psychology, marketing, even the police use it in interviews. When you listen to what someone is saying, you're going to hear one of three things. First of all, you're going to hear a problem that they want to describe. The second, less likely, but they may talk about a remedy for that problem. Less likely is they're going to talk about the outcome which has happened. And he developed a set of questions that you can ask. Very simple questions. There's only about a dozen of them. But the first question is, somebody says, 'Okay, I want to get away from the nine-to-five', so you would respond, and you'd say, 'So, you want to get away from the nine-to-five', you don't say the seven-to-seven or the eight-to-four, you use exactly their language, I want to get away from the nine-to-five, 'and when you get away from the nine-to-five, then what happens?' And you're inviting them to look for the remedy. And once they move on to the remedy, then you don't stop there. Because the problems and remedies, they're just a washing machine. They just go around and around in circles with each other. We always think of it that you start with a problem, and then you come to some kind of solution or remedy. But actually, you can equally say you start with a solution, and you come to a problem. Every solution creates problems. Again, thinking of Australia, I spend a lot of time in Australia, they introduced cane toads to try deal with some kind of pest. And now, of course, they've got so many cane toads, they don't know what to do with them all. Every problem creates a solution. Every solution creates a new problem. And on and on and on. It's an endless loop, and you can join it at any point. But when you move into outcome, it all disappears. It all just disappears.

Jeremy Cline [00:37:36]:
What practically, I'm always keen to leave the listeners with some practical takeaways, what practically can the listeners do with some of this information?

Bill Aronson [00:37:49]:
Can I give you a recommendation for some books that they could read, just so they could explore some more and then get a sense of how this could be useful?

Jeremy Cline [00:37:57]:
Yeah, sure.

Bill Aronson [00:37:58]:
Okay, so there's two books that I would strongly recommend, neither of which I wrote. One is called I Is an Other, it's by James Geary, and the subtitle of it is The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World. So, that's a really good introduction to metaphor. And it looks at it across lots of different domains, from business to innovation to culture, lots of different places. So, even if one chapter you won't find particularly interesting because it's not your area of interest, I'm sure you'll find at least one chapter in there where you go, 'Oh, that's actually really interesting.' And the other is Metaphors in Mind by James Lawley and Penny Tompkins. And the subtitle of that is Transformation Through Symbolic Modelling.

Jeremy Cline [00:38:55]:
And so, if someone reads those books, can you maybe give one or two things that someone will then be able to do that will make a positive impact on their lives as a result of reading the lessons in either of those books?

Bill Aronson [00:39:12]:
Well, the first book, I Is an Other, will give them just a kind of a general grounding and understanding of the importance of metaphor, and this is a very compressed version of what those books are describing. The second book would probably start to give them some practical tools of ways that they can understand how they're behaving, and some tools and techniques that they could then use in their everyday life. And from there, you can go off, and you can learn about clean language, and there are workshops and trainings all over the world that you can do with people who are expert in it. It is the most extraordinary thing to do, really extraordinary. Watching a clean language session where you have two people, one person asking the questions, another person responding, you're watching the internal workings of somebody's mind, and it's quite extraordinary to watch. And you see these moments where suddenly there's a transformation. Because transformation is just so much more important than change. We live in a world of change. We think that the world needs to change. It doesn't need to change. Change is actually incredibly boring. There's no surprise in change. Whereas transformation is something different. It isn't a better, faster, cheaper change. It is of order of magnitude different. And these are tools and techniques which will enable you to learn about the science of transformation.

Jeremy Cline [00:40:54]:
So, maybe a very short example, a very short case study about how someone might find themselves transformed if they start to dive into this work, just for example.

Bill Aronson [00:41:09]:
Okay, I'll give you a business example first. And my mind is scrambling to find a personal example, so I'll give you a business example. So, Sugar Australia, they used to be an organisation which sold sugar. And every year, a guy would go with a clipboard, and on the clipboard would be the price list. This is what we're going to be selling, these particular products, for the next 12 months. And this is how you buy it. And I met with Russell Abotomey, who was a general manager who was brought in to run that company, and he said, 'No, we're going to do things differently.' So, from then on, he walked in, and instead of doing that, he actually really sat down with his customers and said, 'I really want to understand your business, and I really understand what it is that you do and how you go about doing things.' So, sugar, in fact, is like an explosive material. If you have sugar as a dust, it can actually combust, it can cause fires. It's extremely dangerous, hazardous material. So, one of the things that they did is, they actually really trained all of their customers in how to design the factories and the systems to make sure that that didn't happen, which, of course, prevented accidents, saved people's lives. And they designed the way that the business worked into a much more adjusting time kind of way of working. Because now, there was a relationship of trust between the customer and the supplier. And because there was that relationship of trust, they could have a much more adjusting time. Okay, I need this tomorrow. If I don't, my whole factory is going to shut down. And so, they did that, and that meant it was much more efficient, both from Sugar Australia's point of view, but also from the customers' point of view. It was actually a more profitable way of running the business, even though that wasn't the original intention. For a more of a personal one, I don't know. For me, it's sort of so embedded in the way that I see the world now that it's kind of difficult to pick things out. Okay, so I mean, I'll give you an example in my business. So, in my business, I was developing this security device. And we had a problem with it. And the problem was that if the temperature of the environment changed, the security device stopped working. And we spent hours and hours and hours working on this. And we were just really, really stuck. And then, I went into my idea machine. I have this idea machine at home. It's a special environment. And what you do is, you take off all your clothes, and you stand in this box, and you turn this knob and hot water comes out. You might recognise it. It's called a shower. So, that's where I get all my good ideas. So, when you begin to understand the metaphorical landscape which you're inhabiting, then you start to move things around inside that, and you say, 'Well, what if I move this to here? And what if I move it to there?' So, in this particular example, what I did is, I said, 'I have a sensor, which I am seeing as having a problem, because temperature is impacting it. Why don't I flip that on its head? Why don't I say, "I have a temperature sensor, and what I need to do is to make it secure."' So, make the problem part of the game. Don't try and get rid of the problem. Don't push the problem out of your metaphorical landscape. Embrace it and say, 'Okay, what happens if we make that problem the purpose of this game?' And so, we did that, and I went back to my chief scientist, and I said, 'What do you think of that?' And he said, 'Holy crap! That's really good. Yeah. That actually gives a distinction between what you're doing and what the competitors are doing.' And that changed the whole direction. And we then continued on with that. We ended up with four patents, and we now are in a situation where it's about to go into the marketplace. And I think it'll be very helpful and very effective in terms of making the IoT world much more secure, but also the environmental world much more green. And it all came out of just sitting in my metaphorical landscape and just moving two pieces around.

Jeremy Cline [00:46:21]:
I think what I like there is you've got a reframing. So, it's not, 'this is a problem'. It's, 'oh, this is interesting, this is a thing, let's play around with it, let's flip it around'. And you've got that combined with a curiosity. So, it's not a, 'oh, how are we going to fix this?' It's almost like, 'I wonder how we're going to fix this.'

Bill Aronson [00:46:47]:
Well, taking the fixing out. They said fixing is part of the struggle, the battle. It's a problem. It's no longer a problem. It's just no longer a problem. It's just one component, and we just need to move the components around until they all go.

Jeremy Cline [00:47:06]:
Okay. So, rather than 'I wonder how we fix this', it's 'I wonder what happens if I do this'.

Bill Aronson [00:47:13]:
Yes. Yes.

Jeremy Cline [00:47:15]:
Great. Okay. Well, Bill, thank you so much for a fascinating, at times quite metaphysical, but very interesting conversation. I don't know if you want people to find you, but if you do, where would you like them to go?

Bill Aronson [00:47:31]:
Well, my company website is cera.io, C-E-R-A dot I-O. And that's probably as good a starting place, isn't it?

Jeremy Cline [00:47:42]:
I better give you an opportunity to plug your book as well.

Bill Aronson [00:47:46]:
Oh, can I?

Jeremy Cline [00:47:47]:
Absolutely. Yeah.

Bill Aronson [00:47:49]:
Okay. So, yeah, recently, I was aware that there's so many people who've written about Bitcoin and how significant it is. And they always write from a point of view, from economics or politics or philosophy or technical. They're non-fictional books in particular areas. And there's so many good writers in that space. But there's a real limited number of people who've written for a wider audience, for a fiction audience. So, I thought, I'm going to write a really trashy book that you could read on a plane, or you could read on a beach. It's just going to be light and easy, and it's going to answer the question, who is Satoshi Nakamoto? Fictional. And so, it just tells a story. It tells a story about the origins of bitcoin and who invented it and how it came to be created and some of the challenges they faced and some of the questions that they were asking along the way. And it's all done within an adventure story which spans the planet. And it's called The Cathedral. You can get it on Amazon, in Kindle, paperback or hardback editions. It's called The Cathedral, because bitcoin is a little bit like a cathedral. The architect of the cathedral, you know, cathedrals can sometimes take 400, 500, 600, 700 years before they're complete. There are several cathedrals in the world right now which are not complete and have been going for several hundred years. So, bitcoin has an architect. We don't know who they were. It has all the original builders, the original masons. By the time bitcoin completes this first cycle, it's 2140, all of those people will be dead. So, brick by brick, block by block, another element of that has been created. And so, I thought, fun to write a book about that. So, that's what I did.

Jeremy Cline [00:49:52]:
Fantastic. Well, I'll certainly put a link to that in the show notes. Bill, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Bill Aronson [00:49:59]:
Thank you, Jeremy.

Jeremy Cline [00:50:02]:
Okay. Hope you enjoyed that interview with Bill Aronson. That one was certainly a bit different from a lot of my regular interviews. And I have to say, I had never really thought of metaphor as being almost like a survival tool, as a means of filtering just the vast amount of information that gets thrown at us every day. I am also aware of the effect that metaphor has on the way I think about things. As I record this, I am in the process of building my own business. At times, that does feel like a struggle. And I think the reason for that is that in my mind, a lot hangs on it. I'm creating this means by which I can be the breadwinner in my household. It's our means of paying life expenses and putting food on the table. But I'm also aware that that metaphor doesn't necessarily serve me. If I speak to a potential new client, and what's going on in my head is that this is a battle to be won, it's part of the struggle, then it's going to affect the way I interact with that potential new client. Frankly, I'm probably going to come across as being a little bit desperate, and I am much less likely to sign up that client. Whereas if I come from a place of curiosity, not a curiosity about whether or not I'm going to sign the client, but a curiosity about where the potential client is and what are the ways that I might be able to help them, it's a far more relaxing mindset for me, and that's something which will probably come across in my interactions. Show notes for this episode are at changeworklife.com/202, that's changeworklife.com/202, where you'll find the transcript of this interview and links to the resources which Bill mentioned. I've said this before, and I'll probably say it again, but this is your podcast as much as it is mine. So, what do you want to hear? What topics for me to cover would be useful for you? Let me know. Go to changeworklife.com/contact and drop me a line, let me know what you'd like to hear about. In the meantime, you know what I'm going to say next, and that's that we've got a great episode coming up in two weeks' time. So, subscribe to the show if you haven't already, and I can't wait to see you then. Cheers. Bye.