Maybe not everything is a fight

I've noticed that when men reach for analogies, they often evoke war. Fights. Blows. Bombs. Everything has a body count.

A good analogy creates a mental model to make something abstract more relatable or concrete. War metaphors don’t do that for everyone. They can make the moment feel combative when it isn’t, and they often say more about the person using them than the situation at hand.

At one company all-hands, a marketing leader introduced our demand gen strategy by showing a photo of a Vietnam-era warplane and calling it a “carpet bombing” approach—referring to how we’d attract more customers. It was meant to be energizing, but it left me uneasy. If you’re in the business of creating value—building products, serving customers, solving hard problems—then war might not be the most useful frame. When strategy is framed as conquest, it often ends up reactive and defensive, more focused on outdoing competitors than creating something better for the people you’re trying to serve.

A friend once told me that talking with me takes “going a few rounds.” He meant it affectionately I think, but it got me thinking about how often discussion gets framed as sparring. When that mindset seeps into work, it can shift the dynamic: instead of uncovering truths together, it starts to feel like a match, where one person wins. You may forget that you’re still at the same company, working toward the same goal because the framing can make it feel otherwise.

When so much is likened to a war, eventually you may start creating an environment where it is. These metaphors take root in workplaces shaped by men, where fights and zero-sum games quietly become the default framing. Not all men use them, but many women, myself included, notice the aggression. We notice how anger-coded language reshapes the room. And too often, before we can even begin to solve the actual problem at hand, we first have to disarm the posture. It’s labor that shouldn’t be necessary, and it slows everyone down.

So maybe next time, when you want to compare something to a battle, at least consider what else it could be instead. A road trip. A theatre production. A renovation. Not everything has to be a fight.