By Mohan Ramcharan
When I first encountered Ray Ison’s “juggler metaphor” in systems thinking, I wasn’t impressed. I didn’t find it insightful, illuminating, or practically useful. Quite the opposite: I found it torturous, unwieldy, and unnecessarily complicated.
Instead of clarifying systems practice, it seemed to tie the practitioner in conceptual knots, forcing us to mentally juggle abstract categories that added complexity without delivering genuine insight.
The more I reflected on it, the more I realised: this wasn’t just an awkward metaphor—it was a metaphor that complicated what could be explained far more simply, elegantly, and intuitively.
That’s why I propose an alternative: the driver metaphor (or isophor). Where Ison’s juggler metaphor feels like an academic exercise in conceptual gymnastics, the driver metaphor offers a straightforward, relatable, and powerful framing—a metaphor as simple and elegant as Darwin’s theory of evolution: not simplistic, but profoundly explanatory without unnecessary cognitive burden.
This essay is not merely a critique of a metaphor. It is a fifth-order interrogation of how metaphors in systems thinking operate as ontological imaginaries, institutional artefacts, and epistemic closures. It is a call to reflect on how our pedagogical devices embed deeper structures of inclusion, exclusion, authority, and legitimacy.
The juggler metaphor: multiplying complexity without adding insight
Ray Ison’s juggler metaphor (Ison, 2010, p. 59) describes systems practice as a process of keeping four conceptual “balls” in the air:
- The B-ball: Being a practitioner with a particular tradition of understanding
- The E-ball: Engaging with the real-world situation
- The C-ball: Contextualising approaches for the situation
- The M-ball: Managing one’s performance
On paper, this appears an attempt to map different dimensions of systems practice. But in practice, it splits practice into artificially separated categories, introduces unnecessary jargon, and forces practitioners into a mental exercise of tracking abstract domains rather than engaging with their embedded, situated experience.
Instead of supporting practice, it feels like academic overcomplication masquerading as depth. Every “ball” becomes a conceptual token to be defined, explained, justified—adding layers of theory that obscure rather than illuminate.
I remember thinking: why does effective systems practice need a complex multi-ball juggling act? Why multiply categories when the practitioner’s reality is already relational, situated, and constrained?
An experiential disconnect: we don’t imagine ourselves as jugglers
My impression was also that the practitioner—in this case, the student trying to learn Ison’s isophor—cannot realistically imagine being the juggler. Most people don’t juggle. Realistically, most people imagine looking at a juggler—watching someone else juggle pins, balls, or clubs on a stage or in a performance.
In this way, the metaphor inadvertently positions the practitioner as an observer of juggling, not an embodied participant in the act. It distances the learner from the metaphor’s core action, reducing their engagement to watching rather than doing.
Because most people have never juggled, they can’t meaningfully imagine the sensations, challenges, or tacit skills involved. The metaphor becomes an external spectacle rather than an internalised frame of action.
By contrast, most people can and do engage with being a driver. Driving is a common, everyday embodied practice. People know what it feels like to control a car, navigate roads, respond to unpredictable events, read signs, and adjust speed in real time. They understand—directly, experientially—what it means to drive within constraints, negotiate risks, and take responsibility for movement through shared spaces.
This makes the driver metaphor immediately relatable, accessible, and experientially grounded in ways the juggler metaphor simply cannot achieve for most learners. It invites identification, not observation; embodied understanding, not abstract analogy.
The driver metaphor: simple, elegant, explanatory
By positioning the practitioner inside the system as a driver, the metaphor captures what the juggler metaphor misses: positionality, relationality, constraint, accountability.
The driver metaphor doesn’t split practice into abstract epistemic tokens to be mentally balanced. It situates the practitioner as an actor embedded within a relational, dynamic environment where action is both enabled and constrained by structures, affordances, and ethical responsibilities.
Driving is not about balancing categories in the air. It’s about navigating roads, obstacles, traffic, weather—while interacting with others who are also moving through the system.
And crucially, unlike juggling, it’s something most people have done, can imagine doing, and understand from lived experience. This makes the metaphor both cognitively accessible and ontologically situated—qualities essential for metaphors intended to guide real-world systemic practice.
The driver metaphor achieves what the juggler metaphor struggles to do:
✅ It is intuitive and accessible across professions and cultures
✅ It centres the practitioner’s positionality within a system, not outside it
✅ It reflects constraint, accountability, relationality, and ethical stakes
✅ It avoids unnecessary abstraction while retaining conceptual depth
Put simply: it explains more while demanding less cognitive acrobatics. It’s like Darwin’s theory of evolution—profound, powerful, elegant, and clear.
A deeper critique: who benefits from complexity inflation?
My critique of the juggler metaphor isn’t merely stylistic. It’s epistemic—and institutional.
When metaphors multiply categories and conceptual layers beyond what’s practically necessary, who benefits?
I would argue that such complexity inflation often serves academic ego, institutional gatekeeping, and professional status more than practitioner empowerment.
By elaborating the metaphor into four abstract balls, each with its own name and function, the metaphor doesn’t merely illustrate practice—it produces a theoretical apparatus that reinforces the authority of the academic who controls its definition and interpretation.
In doing so, it risks creating a legitimacy economy around complexity: signalling expertise by making practice appear more conceptually difficult than it needs to be (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980).
Meanwhile, real practitioners—especially those outside academia—are left navigating conceptual frameworks that may obscure more than they reveal.
The driver metaphor resists this inflation. It stays grounded, relational, intuitive, and accessible. It doesn’t reduce complexity—it simply refuses to multiply categories unnecessarily. It doesn’t perform complexity for prestige; it invites clarity for action.
A fifth-order critique: beyond epistemic inflation to institutional dynamics
This critique also gestures toward a deeper reality: metaphors are not neutral pedagogical devices; they are institutional artefacts embedded in systems of academic authority, intellectual capital, and professional legitimacy.
From a fifth-order perspective (Bhaskar, 1998; Reynolds & Holwell, 2010), we must ask:
→ What ontological and epistemic closures are stabilised by this metaphor’s academic uptake?
→ Whose authority, reputation, and economic benefit depend on maintaining the metaphor’s legitimacy?
When a metaphor becomes part of an academic’s signature contribution—tied to books, lectures, keynotes, consultancies—it ceases to function merely as a heuristic. It becomes a symbolic anchor of institutional legitimacy and professional identity.
In such contexts, critique isn’t just an intellectual challenge—it threatens the scaffolding of institutional authority, economic capital, and academic ego.
This is why, I suspect, critiques of such metaphors meet not only intellectual resistance but defensive closure: the stakes are not epistemic alone, but existential and structural.
Conclusion: reframing systems practice for real practitioners
Metaphors matter. They’re not just pedagogical tools—they’re ontological imaginaries. They shape what systems practice is imagined to be, what agency is considered possible, and what realities are made visible or invisible.
The juggler metaphor, for all its intentions, burdens practitioners with conceptual juggling that privileges academic complexity over relational navigation. The driver metaphor offers a simpler, clearer, and more relationally accountable framing—without sacrificing the nuance needed for real systems practice.
Like the theory of evolution, it explains elegantly without unnecessary complication. And in doing so, it invites more practitioners to see themselves inside systems, navigating complexity with awareness of positionality, constraint, and responsibility.
We need metaphors that empower practitioners, not just metaphors that perform complexity to maintain academic prestige. Let’s choose metaphors that illuminate, not obfuscate. Let’s drive systems thinking forward—not juggle it in the air.
References:
Ison, R. (2010). Systems Practice: How to Act in a Climate-Change World. Springer.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press.
Bhaskar, R. (1998). The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences. Routledge.
Reynolds, M., & Holwell, S. (2010). Systems Approaches to Managing Change: A Practical Guide. Springer.