Whatif… Metaphors are for sensemaking?
This semester, I asked the students in BUS201 - Business Dynamics at the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign - a deceptively simple question:
If your team experience were a metaphor, what would it be?
They were all in the same class. They worked through the same simulation. They faced the same constraints, deadlines, and uncertainty. And yet, when asked to reflect, each team described their experience in a completely different way.
One team described their journey as a poem being written (they know how much I love a poem - because I make them write them!). At the beginning, ideas were scattered and unformed. Early weeks felt like rough drafts, with false starts and awkward lines. Over time, the team found its rhythm, reaching a kind of flow where collaboration felt more natural. By the end, the poem was complete—something only the team itself could fully understand or appreciate.
Another team chose Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. Their experience included a major breakdown late in the simulation. Instead of ignoring it, they leaned into honest communication and psychological safety. The “break” became the turning point. What mattered most wasn’t perfection, but how they repaired themselves and moved forward together.
One team saw themselves as an iceberg. What others could see—the business simulation decisions and final results—was only a small part of the story. Beneath the surface lived hours of conversation, disagreement, coordination, reflection, and learning. The visible outcomes were shaped by a much deeper, mostly invisible process.
Another team described their experience as a lantern. The lantern didn’t remove uncertainty or light the entire path. It simply provided enough illumination to take the next step. For them, leadership wasn’t about certainty or control, but about shared responsibility and moving forward together even when the full picture wasn’t clear.
Several teams framed their journey around uncertainty and patience. One compared the semester to a poker hand—starting with weak cards, staying in the game anyway, taking calculated risks, and slowly building confidence through trust and persistence. Another described the team as baking a cake, where rushing to fix problems without understanding them would only make things worse. Progress required coordination, experimentation, and learning from mistakes.
Others emphasized growth over time. One team used a blossoming flower, beginning as a seed and gradually developing stronger roots before blooming. Another described a long hike uphill, marked by uneven terrain and unclear paths, but made possible through consistency and shared effort. Looking back, the difficulty of the climb made the progress more visible.
Across all of these metaphors, one thing stood out to me: the metaphors weren’t decorative. They were explanatory.
Each metaphor revealed how a team understood failure, progress, leadership, and learning. Some saw breakdowns as something to repair. Others saw uncertainty as an inevitable starting point. Some emphasized steady improvement over dramatic wins. Others focused on the conditions that allowed people to work well together.
They all had the same experience. But they made sense of it in different ways.
That matters, because effective teams don’t just complete tasks—they construct meaning. Metaphors are one of the primary ways we decide what an experience was: whether it was a failure or a foundation, a setback or a lesson, a moment of control or a moment of shared leadership.
Which makes me wonder: Whatif metaphor isn’t just how we describe teamwork, but how we actually understand it? What if asking, “What was your metaphor?” tells us more than asking, “Did you succeed?”
And maybe the most useful question of all: What metaphor are you using right now to describe your own team, your work, or your life?
Whatif…. once you can name the metaphor, you can begin to change the story?