From fighting fires to building bridges: the role of metaphor in systems requirements

The problems of systems development have been called a chronic affliction with no apparent cure. We see issues of misunderstanding: misunderstanding in the practice of communication and misunderstanding of the nature of the communication at the heart of this problem. We illustrate the standard model of systems requirements, a reductionist model based on the conduit metaphor of communications, which minimises proper understanding. We describe how this approach is conceptually flawed and use developments from cognitive science to gain a deeper understanding of embodied cognition and the role of metaphor in communication. We show how even our understanding and application of understanding is confined by the usage of analogies and metaphors such as 'grasping' and 'filling', which relate to physical objects. We show that avoiding reductionism is more challenging than not using the conduit approach. It requires working with the problems at the second level. We need to identify and use metaphors about understanding that do not cause an unconscious dumbing down of the processes involved in systems development. Concluding that conceptual difficulties necessarily arise when groups are working with different metaphorical concepts grounded in their personal experience, we suggest some approaches for improving communication.