Analogies Are Kind of Like a Translator

You may be surprised how often your audience is asking this…
You may also be surprised when someone comes to your house and draws this on your driveway. If that describes you - move out of state.

One of the skills that you need to advance in IT is being able to communicate and work with nontechnical colleagues “in the business.” For instance, if you work in a bank’s infrastructure department you may start out talking exclusively to other folks in the infrastructure group, but I promise you that you can only get so far in your career before you need to talk to people who work in loan processing or quality assurance – the people who work in the core areas of what the company actually does. This is a critical skill to have and this week I hope to give you one tool that I have used to really help me explain sometimes complex technical concepts to colleagues I am working with who haven’t dedicated twenty years to mastering enterprise technology. I’ve found that this one thing will help cut through jargon and get a concept clear in your customer’s head most of the time.

I’m talking about the simple analogy. I’ve found that being able to compare and relate a technical concept to something that my audience or client is familiar with can get the point across faster than spending a ton of time explaining or drawing what I’m talking about out on a whiteboard. As simple as the concept is, it seems to be the one that I rotate to the most often in both my day job as well as the volunteer gig we all get as the neighborhood and family CIO.

I actually remember the very first time I used an analogy to explain a technical concept to someone who wasn’t getting it. I was in junior high and I was working a computer that belonged to one of my grandfather’s friends. It was a DOS based computer, and I was trying to help him understand the concept of directories because all of his files were in one jumbled mess that was almost impossible to find anything in (adding to this difficulty is the fact that filenames only had an eight-character limit plus a three character extension back then). I was struggling to get him to understand how directories could help, and I realized that this was a former business owner who volunteered to council other small businesses in his retirement. It hit me that I had to make directories seem similar to something he was comfortable with.

I am not a graphic designer. Send complaints to the folks at Microsoft paint.

“It’s like a file cabinet,” I said. “You don’t just throw papers in a file cabinet, right? You put hanging files in there, and then you put folders into the hanging files, and papers go in there. It’s the same with directories. You can put a directory in a directory and then have files in there. It keeps it organized.” You could literally see the lightbulb go off in his head as I said this. He instantly got it and had started filing before I had even left. I also got $50 for helping him out – which come to think of it may have been my first paid IT gig. The next time I saw him, his files were immaculately organized. He wasn’t a disorganized person – he just didn’t understand the tool.

The point is this: I used something familiar and comfortable for him to explain something that he found foreign and confusing. I drew parallels between his world and the world he was attempting to understand. I think that there is enormous power in this simple tool of explanation. I think there are just two characteristics that make an analogy great, so let’s unpack them briefly.

First, it must draw on something that the audience already understands at an almost visceral level. It requires no explanation because they are comfortable with the subject matter. A great example is if you’re explaining storage options for virtual infrastructure to someone in the car business, you may want to explain that capacity is like how much a vehicle can haul around, and IOPS is how fast the car can go. The point is that for $50K you can go really fast but not carry much, or you can haul a ton but not go very fast. But if you want to haul a lot really quickly, you need to spend a lot more than $50K.

Look, I’m working with free stock photography. That it came back with anything when I searched for “analogies” is kind of a miracle.
Side note: I can’t stand Scrabble. I’m more of a Monopoly person.

In the above example your audience understands cars and by helping frame the conversation in terms of cars, you can move the discussion forward so that you have a mutual understanding far quicker than trying to get into the nitty gritty of randomized 4K IOPS.  For whatever it’s worth I tend to equate a lot of things to cars - especially when I’m talking about datacenter tech - because most people are pretty comfortable around cars. Until the pandemic raged most of us were in a car at least once per day (I say this fully aware that my car currently sits totally unutilized).

The second part of a good analogy is that it has to be able to be expanded upon. In the above example of storage, the analogy can be stretched a bit. For instance, if the client really wants a petabyte of super-fast storage, you can equate it to buying enough Ferraris to zip all the cargo around really fast. You could also offer a hybrid approach; maybe we can buy some Ferraris so get the really important stuff around quickly, but the less important data can be driven around in semi-trucks. The important part is that the analogy still makes sense when it’s stretched a little bit.

Generally speaking, I find analogies to be a fun and succinct way to get a point across to my audience. While it’s not a 100% sure-fire way to get everyone on the same page, I’ve sold a lot of ideas by using things like cars, real estate, and even laptops as proxies for large datacenter solutions.

If you find that you’re struggling to get an idea across to someone, step back and see if you can reframe the conversation in a way that your audience can immediately access by using an analogy. It’s sort of like having a Babel fish ready to go when you find out that you and your audience aren’t speaking the same language.

Questions for reflection:

• How often are you in a situation where you’re trying to explain a technical concept to someone who isn’t technical?

• When you need to get an idea across quickly to someone who isn’t building their career on the knowledge presented, how do you get it across quickly?

• Have you ever used an analogy that didn’t work as well as you’d hoped? How can you stress-test an analogy before you use it?