Early in my career, I was the first marketing guy at a startup surrounded by engineers. They had no idea what marketing was supposed to do. But I needed their help — their time, their attention, their willingness to ship things on my behalf.

So I did what any trained marketer would do. I opened a presentation and walked through thirty slides of marketing frameworks. I looked around the room after wrapping up my final slide. The faces across the table were perfectly blank. 

Here is a problem that comes up more often than most of us realize: you understand your world. Your audience understands theirs. And those two worlds are not always the same.

You want them to understand you, to care enough to act differently, approve the thing, or change their mind. And that shift rarely happens through explanation alone.

A metaphor is a bridge. You take something unfamiliar — cloud computing, emotional burnout, a company strategy — and you say: this is like something you already know. A kitchen drawer full of expired spices; a pair of glasses that feels strange at first, then indispensable; a wardrobe with staple pieces for every season.

Then they get it. You have not taught them anything new. You have simply reminded them of something they already understood in their bones.

You start to notice this in how people explain things when they want something to move.

None of these are fancy. They just make the idea easier to see.

The next week, I tried something different.

I walked in and said: "You build incredible systems. Clean architecture, well-documented code, efficient endpoints. But every system needs an API — a way for the outside world to talk to it without needing to understand the entire codebase. That is marketing. I am the API for everything you build. I make it usable and understandable for customers, sales, and everyone else who cannot read your code."

The engineers sat up. One of them said: "So you are not asking us to change what we build. You are asking us to give you the right endpoints."

That was it.

Pick one thing at work you keep explaining over and over — a process change, a strategic shift, or even just why a deadline matters. Before your next conversation, ask yourself: What ordinary thing does this feel like to me? 

Do not aim for clever. If a metaphor has to be explained, it isn’t a metaphor; it’s a riddle.

Then say that metaphor as your opening sentence. Do not explain it. Let it sit. If the other person says "oh, so like when..." — you have built your bridge.

The Nguni Bantu phrase "Ubuntu" translates roughly to: "I am because we are."

Archbishop Desmond Tutu described it this way: "A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, not threatened that others are able and good."

In practice, Ubuntu shows up in how conflicts are resolved. The question is never only "who is right?" but also "how do we all move forward together?" Watch this BBC video.