Familiar things feel safer, truer, or more likable.
More quotesAn analogy is a smuggler. It carries an action across the border while everyone admires the comparison.
Students given Second World War cues preferred military action. Give others Vietnam cues and diplomacy looked better. Same fictional conflict, different borrowed ending.
Business language does this before breakfast. Call the market a battlefield and somebody must conquer. Call the company a family and disagreement begins to feel like betrayal. Call a product a platform and ecosystems, partners and tolls enter the conversation before customers have asked for any of them.
Analogies are indispensable. New problems arrive without instructions, so familiar structure gives thought somewhere to start. The trouble begins when resemblance quietly imports the whole script. Markets have no casualties in the literal sense. Families cannot make redundancies. Platforms can collapse under the weight of features intended to justify the noun.
Force a second analogy into important decisions. If this resembles a war, how might it also resemble gardening, policing or a queue? Which facts fit each, which disappear, and what action suddenly feels “obvious”? The clash exposes assumptions that one comparison had disguised as reality.
Never ask only whether an analogy is clever. Ask what it is trying to make you do. By then the smuggled action may already be unpacking its bags.