The Power of Comparison

A STAR TREK ANALOGY TO THE RESCUE

David Pensak, founder of Raptor Systems—now a part of Symantec—is best known for bringing the first commercial Internet firewall to market. A multifaceted innovator with more than forty patents to his name, Pensak faced an uphill battle explaining what an Internet firewall was at a time when businesses and consumers were still trying just to understand the purpose of the Internet itself.

Pensak's inspiration for describing the firewall came from the epic late-1960s television show Star Trek. Pensak came up with a brilliant analogy that cut through the novelty of the firewall and explained the concept in a way that was immediately accessible to his target audience. Pensak was fascinated with Star Trek's notion of “beaming” an individual from one location to another. In the show, beaming was a function of a transporter, a teleportation machine that converted people or things into energy (dematerialization) and reconverted them back into matter (rematerialization) once the energy had been “beamed” someplace else. “When transporting someone, sometimes the transmission was fast and clean,” says Pensak, “but sometimes engineer Scotty had problems beaming people and fiddling with the controls was necessary.” And the dematerialization/rematerialization process from Star Trek happens to be an excellent analogy for explaining the Internet. As Pensak explains, “This fictional invention sets the stage for the reality that with any communication medium you can have static or dropped packets.”

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP) are the fundamental communication protocols that make the Internet function. TCP/IP enables your computer to send messages to or get information from a mother computer that also has a copy of TCP/IP. Think of TCP/IP as a two-layer program. The higher layer, the Transmission Control Protocol, manages the assembling of a message or file into small packets that are then transmitted over the Internet. The file is received by a TCP layer at a corresponding computer, which then reassembles the packets into the original message. The Internet Protocol, or lower layer, handles the packet address so that your file gets to the right destination. TCP/IP is amazingly flexible and can allow myriad sizes and types of packets.

Pensak found that comparing the transporter and TCP/IP was an effective means of explaining his product to his audience. When a person is “beamed” through the transporter, he's reduced to bits of energy. Those bits travel and arrive in a jumble, and it's up to the machine on the receiving end to make sense of the mess and reassemble the person. Similarly, when we send information over the Internet, it's broken down into packets that are sent and arrive in no particular order. Each piece has a serial number that the receiving end is able to read, enabling it to display the information as it was meant to be seen, in its proper order.

The analogy goes even further by describing problems in the beaming process, providing a platform from which Pensak is then able to explain the need for a firewall. Imagine if you entered the transporter room and someone arrived who was not who you were expecting; or, worse, suppose that you were in the transporter and instead of arriving at your destination, you were kidnapped. People using computers had not worried about analogous possibilities with their Internet messages because they had not conceived of the possibility before. Pensak's firewall, like the transporter, would protect against data getting scrambled or kidnapped in the same way.

“If we had tried to do this without the visual analogy that Star Trek gave us, we would have had to teach computer science to people who didn't know and didn't need to know. Our job was much easier as a result,” said Pensak. He knew that this analogy would be a sure winner with his audience, many of whom were bound to be Trekkies just like him and almost all of whom would at least have watched some episodes.

ANALOGIES = AHA

There may be no more difficult task in communication than explaining a concept for which your audience has no foundation. The basis of what we do as writers and presenters is to break down complicated topics into simpler concepts. That should always be your first step. But what if your audience simply can't fathom what you're talking about despite your excellent attempts at clarity? If they can't grasp what something is, perhaps they'll understand what something is like. Analogies, explanations through comparison and association, are tools we can harness to link the unfamiliar to what is known, putting our audience at ease.

Analogies are the figures of speech that lead to the “aha” moments of simple epiphany. That's what we're aiming for with our audience. I use the term analogy in this chapter to mean a comparison between two ideas that is based on similar features. Metaphors and similes are both cousins of analogies. They, too, are excellent linguistic figures that can simplify explanations of complicated ideas, but metaphors and similes are more artistic and literary, which means that they are less exact. You probably remember writing similes in high school: phrases that link associated objects or ideas by words such as “like” or “as.” Metaphors are even more poetic and rely on associating two unlike things. In contrast, a simple analogy—the comparison of two like features—can be both very exact and very effective.

Analogies have been around since long before Aesop wrote his fables, but don't believe for a minute that this old-school trick is any less useful today. Comparisons and associations help us understand new ideas in a way that transcends description. Communicators incorporate analogies into all channels. It doesn't matter whether they're writing a traditional document like a white paper or producing a cutting-edge video for YouTube. Analogies enhance content, especially complicated content, helping your audience make sense of what might otherwise be perceived as being too abstract.

There will almost certainly be times when you can benefit from creating a mental image for your audience. This chapter explains why analogies can be a communicator's best friend, provides examples of how they've been used effectively in real-life applications, and offers tips on learning how to incorporate them into your communication efforts.

YOUR BRAIN CRAVES ANALOGIES

Analogies work amazingly well in communicating complicated ideas. It's all a matter of how our brains work. Research on adult learning suggests that the brain naturally uses analogies to connect new input to existing patterns. As Taylor and Lamoreaux have shown, the brain responds to new situations by asking how the current experience relates to earlier experiences. Our acute, innate ability to evaluate new experience based on stored memories and knowledge of prior situations is an evolutionary advantage unique to mankind. “The human brain,” write Taylor and Lamoreaux, “learns to change its own algorithm to account for variations, contrasts, and more integrative metaphors, leading to more inclusive, creative, and flexible responses to unfolding experience.”³

When we struggle to understand something new—especially if it is complicated—our brains work extra hard to find familiar context from past experiences in order to process the new input. The power of comparison should not be underestimated when attempting to explain a new concept to your audience. Our brains like analogies; in fact, our brains seek analogies. As communicators we need to feed the brain what it wants: comfort food. Give your audience comparisons that they can relate to and it will help their brains digest content more easily.

PAINT VIVID PICTURES

Analogies, along with metaphors and similes, are like poetry and should be used carefully. They can enhance a description or explanation, but in other contexts they may be seen as superfluous and distracting. Knowing your audience is of paramount importance. You need to understand them, as well as knowing what tone is expected for the paper or presentation, before creating descriptive comparisons.

In a documentary, for example, analogies can effectively unpack complex information and help viewers understand content unfamiliar to them. Science writer Eleanor Grant of the National Geographic Channel often uses analogies in her television programs. Grant strives to make her work thought provoking and engaging; she wants her audience to feel the science she is explaining. Analogies help Grant with that goal, but she is always careful not to simply pull out some stale, overused cliché. As a documentarian, Grant does have a fair degree of latitude to dream up as many analogies as she can, and she uses that latitude when appropriate in order to evoke an emotional response that will engage her audience. In her 2007 series Amazing Planet, Grant paints vivid pictures for audiences:

This is the Big Island of Hawaii, home to Kilauea, one of the most active volcanoes on Earth…and perhaps the best place to see the planet's labor pains as it gives birth to itself.

For the poet, this lovely dangerous stuff oozing and spitting out of the volcano might suggest a glowing lifeblood pumped from the red, red heart of a hot vital Earth.

A more apt comparison might be a bad case of indigestion. This is a planet that belches, vomits, and shutters, heaves and passes gas, really nasty gas.

Whether from a pulsing heart or a heaving guy, lava is our only concrete glimpse into the Earth's interior…into an engine of creation and destruction that dwarfs all of the mighty power of the planet's human inhabitants. What lies beneath?⁴

Grant's use of language is powerful and evocative. The analogies she employs are both emotional and shocking. She's trying to create new images—many of them related to our own bodies—to help us feel the power of the Earth and not just intellectually understand it. The language creates the sense for us that the Earth, like the human body, is a living thing. In this brief clip, we hear comparisons to birthing and labor, indigestion, and human anatomy, all in an attempt to punctuate the telling of a geological event. The vividness of the language, which accompanies equally compelling video of an active volcano, can grab wide swaths of the target audience: families. We can easily see people in their living rooms, watching the National Geographic Channel and both learning and being entertained. The analogies add texture, connectivity, and immediacy to the script. Grant relates eruption to experiences most of the audience will have had or at least witnessed. People watching and listening will not need to create new categories in their brains in order to process this information. That's already been done, and everything is made as simple as the actions in our everyday lives.

KNOW WHAT IS FAMILIAR TO YOUR AUDIENCE

Interested in creating analogies of your own? Good. But remember, analogies come with caveats. Analogies can be double-edged swords: they can help your audience grasp new concepts but they can also undermine your narrative if they open up too many sets of meanings, leading your audience down a spiraling path of misconception. And while good analogies are golden, bad analogies only make the complicated more enigmatic. Once your audience has a mental image in its mind, that image is difficult to erase or change.

Good analogies are usually the result of a creative mind that has embarked on a process of free association. The best advice I can give on the topic is just to let your mind go. Think about commonalities between your audience and yourself and see whether you can find a link that makes a comparison possible.

Think carefully about what imagery will resonate best with your audience. Since analogies are about comparisons between what is familiar and what is yet to be experienced, you want to make sure that everyone can easily understand the basis of your comparison. Analogies obviously don't help if you are comparing something new to something equally perplexing. In thinking of what you and your audience share, ask yourself which of the common experiences that you share with them are so natural that they need no further explanation.

Open your mind and let it wander. Think about experiences every one in your audience can share. Is your audience a largely homogeneous group? If they share similar cultural experiences, work in the same profession, or all grew up in the same decade, you have more latitude to be creative with your analogy. Or is the audience a diverse group made up of people from different cultures, varied age groups, or professionals representing myriad industries? If so, you may need to make your analogy more general.

Make sure your analogy is a complete fit; if anything from your comparison doesn't match up perfectly with what you're explaining, head back to the drawing board and try again. Test your new analogy on friends and colleagues for confirmation that it works. It may take some time to develop the skill of thinking analogically, but you'll be pleased with the results your efforts at free association can produce.