The flawed metaphor of parenting
Not very long ago, I ran into a story where the author explained “why being a mom is a CEO job,” with many supportive comments and reactions under the publication. While this could be an attractive narrative, it steers us from thinking straight. I used such “family metaphors” myself, and I was wrong; being a parent is not comparable to a CEO job. Here are the reasons.
1. There is no competition. Really, if you are failing as a parent, it is not like other families will come and take away your children, your income, and your household. At least not in many societies, and such cases, it’s more like to become a subject of regulatory control, not competition. You don’t compete on the market to be where you regard your family. At least not at the same level as a CEO running a company does.
2. There is no IT and infrastructure to manage (really). Even small businesses run a handful of IT systems and are very concerned with the solutions and how they use them. It affects operations a lot in every significant aspect — from customer acquisition to product and service delivery. You must be good at setting up and running IT infrastructure if you want to get some money and some sleep. When you are a parent, it does not matter very much. You can use a notebook and a pencil and still be good at your job.
3. There are no clear goals, metrics, compliance, or governance for parents. Maybe, in some more traditional societies, there can be some “family board meeting,” but in no way is it so obligatory as the board of directors for the CEO. You don’t have to comply with hundreds of laws, the charter, meet the targets, or otherwise explain why you are doing what you are doing. So much more manageable, with freedom and control over your life. Nothing compared to a CEO life.
Metaphors are very attractive, but we must be careful when using them. We don’t need to hallucinate now; we have a chatGPT for that. If we bring some metaphor into the play, let’s think clearly with data. If a CEO job is like parenting, what percentage do we put on the similarity? How do we calculate this number? Running what families are more like a CEO job and why? And if there are no at least vague explanations to these questions, can we not bring the potentially flawed metaphor into the discussion?
When writing this piece, I saw the post where SW development planning had been compared to orienting with GPS. Below is my comment on it.
This metaphor is broken in an essential aspect. Though the project or product team navigates the space seeking success and the ship’s crew, these spaces are very different. Let’s see.
When we use GPS to understand our location and where we need to be, we use infrastructure facts. There is enormous scientific and engineering machinery proving that I am currently at these coordinates — global atomic clock, Internet, GPS constellation, GPS-certified device, geography and trigonometry, navigational mechanics, Boolean logic, metrology, and who knows what else.
When I say I am at some coordinates at some point in time, I rely on this infrastructure, and if someone wants to prove me wrong, they need to prove that the whole infrastructure is flawed. And that’s extremely difficult. The fact that I am where I am at the exact point of time using the GPS data is solid and infrastructural. And with SW development, we don’t have the universal understanding of Euclidian space and global infrastructure that, in a standard way by a standard interface, will tell every project team where they are precisely right now and what maneuvers they need to perform to be at the destination point.
It’s much like navigation in the Great Discoveries era, where Cristóbal Colón was entirely sure until his death that he found East India, and such minor facts that the star map was utterly different could not change his mind. The location without coordinates is a social fact, not an infrastructural one.
That changes the discussion because, in a debate about where we are and where we need to go, we cannot use math, science, or engineering measurements. We seek social consensus. And that’s where the metaphor is broken.
Fix your metaphor before using it.
