There’s no doubting the power of a good metaphor. From tipping the balance of a market access decision, to creating a family culture in our workplace, to the CEO’s belief in ‘servant leadership’, we’re always using expressions that aren’t literally true but communicate our ideas better than a thousand less figurative words.

Often, however, it’s worth spending a little additional thought on choosing a less obvious metaphor, one that has a much deeper meaning than the usual cliches we rely on. I’ve just come off a call that proves this point well. Stick with me and I’ll tell you about it.

You probably know the type of senior executive I’ve just been speaking to. Extravert, larger than life and oozing confidence with which they infect everyone around them. My call was with just such a man. I like him very much, despite the fact that he is so different from me and regards me as overly bookish and academic. I think it’s just this ‘opposites attract’ thing that makes him employ me as a mentor because I’m the ying to his yang, as it were.

Our latest call included discussion of his upcoming internal conference, a big annual event at which he wanted to stride on stage, backed by a huge projection of himself, and motivate his team to, in his words, ‘get out there and hunt down the business’. Almost as a footnote to our mentoring meeting, he asked me what I thought would be a good metaphor for him to use. He favoured a lion on the savannah, an image that fitted both his message and, implicitly, his view of himself.

This was the cue for my nerdish contribution and I asked him the sort of question he hates but also loves. “What if some of your team knows that lions only succeed once in every four tries? Won’t that blunt your message a little bit?” To his credit, he accepted my point while wishing he didn’t have to. “Well then, what hunter succeeds all the time? What metaphor can I use?”

Fortunately, there are few limits to how nerdy I can be. “The dragonfly succeeds about 95% the time.” I pointed out. “And, what’s more, your team can learn from how they succeed.” This caught my mentee’s attention and he asked me to elaborate. I’ll do the same for you, dear reader, because I think you will learn from it too.

Dragonflies are very impressive hunters. Not only do they succeed most of the time, but they also do so when both they and their insect prey are flying through the air, in three dimensions. If you would like to read the research paper that I was drawing on, email me and I’ll send it to you. But for now it’s enough to know that dragonflies have a set of 16 ‘target selective descending neurons’. These allow the dragonfly to focus on its prey and, in simple terms, ignore distractions. The focus neurons send signals to the brain that, although small, has nothing else to do but concentrate on the target. The dragonfly isn’t especially fast, strong or clever but it is uniquely focused. That’s how it is about four times more effective than the magnificently powerful king of the jungle.

My mentee loved the dragonfly metaphor. It wasn’t as glamourous as the lion but it fitted much better with what he was trying to communicate to his team. Competing as they were against several major rivals, he wanted to dispel the idea that they could go head onwith these well-resourced competitors and expect to win simply by force. The dragonfly metaphor communicated the idea that they could win by being smarter than everybody else. It even suggested the way they could do that, by imitating the dragonfly’s focus.

In practice, this translated into much more intelligent segmentation, targeting and positioning, which was a capability he was very keen to encourage. So enthused was he that he picked up the idea of the descending neurons as metaphors for the linkages between his brand marketers, his salespeople and his medical science liaison team. As it turned out, the dragonfly metaphor was also more appealing to his diverse team than the lion was. They didn’t all share his macho admiration of a lion who tears zebras limb from limb. For them, this didn’t resonate with their methods of building authentic relationships with professionals. The delicate, graceful dragonfly imagery worked much better for his team. If a dragonfly can home in on a single insect in a swarm, dodging in three dimensions at high speed, it ought to be easy to find their targeted ‘care driven professionals’ and provide them with value propositions that provided intangible but important benefits to an underserved group of patients.

I’m sure it won’t be long until you’re employing a metaphor to influence colleagues or customers. As Orson Scott Card said, “metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space”. But the take-home part of this story is for you to use metaphors but to do so carefully and avoid cliches. Or, as one might say, to walk on eggshells.