Birthing a New Idea: Metaphors of Pregnancy & Labor at Work

I had the joy of supporting my daughter, Faith, to give birth to her daughter, Minerva, on June 2. 

I’m home now, but I'm still reflecting on the powerful experiences of pregnancy, labor, and birth and letting those inspire me and my work.

It strikes me that these experiences provide potent, rich metaphors for leadership and work, but we don’t often tap into them. Maybe they are too feminine, too intimate, or too unfamiliar to those usually in power. I’m not sure. Today, I invite you to reflect on a few aspects of pregnancy, labor, and birth for the insights they can provide us as metaphors.  

Metaphors Make Meaning

Sounds strange? 

Well, metaphors are, after all, how we communicate with each other about anything conceptual. We actually can’t talk about complex, abstract phenomena without referencing something tangible or concrete. 

Because of this, the metaphors we choose determine how we understand those concepts. They shape our perception of what is included and excluded, visible and invisible, feasible and unfeasible. 

And because of this, no one metaphor can adequately describe a concept. We need multiple metaphors.

Common Organizational Metaphors

In business, we often invoke metaphors of sports and war. 

We work on “teams” and need “coaching.” We “play the long game” and talk about who is “up to bat” or “going out for a long pass” or who “struck out” on the sales call or who is an “all-star” or a “real team player”. 

We use military references like, “If we are gonna slay our competition, we need a “battle plan” to “defeat the enemy.” We set up “war rooms” to coordinate the “front line” staff, and when it’s all over we conduct an “after-action review.”

Those metaphors help us make sense of work in certain ways but they leave other things out. For example, they open up options for competition but certainly shut down possibilities for collaboration or cooperation. And their violence has consequences for our emotional and social well-being. 

Metaphors from Pregnancy and Birth

We would be well-served as teams and as humans to expand our organizational metaphors and embrace other human experiences that offer us new rich possibilities to make sense of work in compelling ways that are currently lost to us. 

We can begin with pregnancy and birth. 

Here are some examples.

“Our product development phases are like the stages of pregnancy.” 

Consider that we might “conceive a new product” and “nurture and protect” it as a product team “gestates” the innovation through different trimesters of maturity until it is ready to be born. 

We might face early struggles that feel like “morning sickness” but pass as the project matures. If a project is unsuccessful, or terminated, that loss would be felt and mourned, the decision to end it understood as difficult and respected. 

If the product makes it to market, it is born, it is a birth to be celebrated, and the team that delivered that product might need some time to recover from their labors. 

The team might also have special care to give to the product in the beginning, but as it matures, others would take on different roles in the life of the product. 

What else might we learn from pregnancy and birth about product development?  

“We need a Doula and a Midwife for this project.”

Instead of the single role of “coach” for a challenging project, consider the dual and complementary roles of midwife (or obstetrician) and doula. 

These are examples of different nuanced types of support: One role provides technical expertise, and the other provides mental, emotional, and interpersonal expertise. Having two people assigned to pay attention to these two different sets of human and project needs can support team success. 

What might we learn about leading a project team from a doula and a midwife or an obstetrician? 

“Team agility means getting good at growing temporary structures to respond to change and support success - like a placenta!”

Stick with me!

Organizational management is overflowing with books, papers, and discussions about the need for agile teams that temporarily form, respond to change, function effectively, produce the desired result, and then disband. 

This agility is the holy grail so many teams pursue. We should be looking for many different models for this ability, many different ways of understanding what is needed and possible.

Did you know that a pregnant woman’s body grows a whole new, temporary organ, the placenta, that sustains the life of the baby until it is born? 

It provides nourishment and oxygenation and acts as a barrier to disease. It breaks open at just the right time and then gracefully ceases to function. 

What shared understanding might our project teams have if they were to adopt the metaphor of the placenta for the structures that need to be created to sustain and support a project team to complete their work? 

What might teams learn from understanding how a placenta functions to get better at forming, performing, and ceasing to function? 

Feeling a Little Squeamish Reading All That? 

I’d challenge you to consider why? 

Why is a human biological structure that sustains human beings repulsive but the slaughter of human beings in war is somehow more appropriate as a reference? 

Realize that we were all sustained by a placenta. Every one of us lived inside one. And it is a truly amazing structure. 

Mindful of Impacts, More Options

It is important to acknowledge that invoking structures, practices, or roles from birth may be sensitive to those who may have grief or trauma related to pregnancy or birth. As with anything we do when working together, we should be choiceful, gentle and wise.

And, the same should go for sports and war metaphors that are constantly used: It doesn’t matter if we are athletic or not, or if we had a terrible experience with sports, it doesn’t matter if we are unable to play sports, or if we were chosen last and traumatized by sports, we are still expected to participate in using sports metaphors. 

Likewise, many of us have not and hopefully will never go to war, or hold views of war that are against deeply held values or religious beliefs, or may have been severely traumatized by wars as combatants or refugees. Yet business language forces these individuals to reference those experiences.

More metaphors will give us more options and insights. We can expand our repertoire creatively, and use them mindfully and more intentionally.

What other human experiences might we invoke as metaphors to illuminate insights and options for how we work together?