When a client hands you three images at once

“We are stuck” is one image, one signal, a picture you can take in at a glance. “We are stuck, the walls are closing in, and someone behind us keeps pushing” is something else. Several signals at once, acting on each other in different ways. The first can be taken apart in a minute. The second asks for a different kind of attention: attention to composition.

The moment there is more than one signal and the signals begin to interact, a metaphor stops being a point and becomes a structure. Most of what a company tells you in the first conversation about a difficult market is a structure of this kind. Most of what gets written down afterwards is a list of points.

What composition in an image is

Composition is what appears when several signals inside one image stop existing separately and enter into relations with each other. The laws at work here come from aesthetics rather than from logic.

Flow or rhythm: does the image move smoothly, or in distinct beats? Contrast: how sharply do the elements differ from one another? Degrees of freedom: how many things in the picture can change independently? Symmetry, or the absence of it?

Symmetry is worth splitting in two, because the two kinds behave differently.

Symmetry by reflection is the one everybody pictures first. An axis cuts the figure and the two halves literally repeat each other. It reads almost without effort.

Symmetry by balance is harder. Different objects sit on either side, held level by weight and significance rather than by shape. Perceiving it costs more internal work, because the elements do not coincide. They compensate one another.

The general rule is simple: the simpler the metaphor, the simpler its composition. A one-move image, “I am stuck”, has almost no composition at all, and it is self-sufficient. “I am holding a position by the river while an offensive comes from three sides” is already an extended composition with several forces in it, each with its own direction.

What changes when the image gets complicated

Take two complaints about the same difficult situation at work.

The first: “They are pressing me.” One source of pressure, one recipient, one direction of force. A one-move metaphor with next to no composition.

The second: “They press me from above, undercut me from below, and off to the side everyone pretends nothing is happening.” Three different forces, arriving from three directions, felt in three different ways: pressure, sabotage, indifference. On top of that an asymmetry, because this is three kinds of action rather than one action repeated three times.

Working with these two cases is different in kind. The one-move metaphor can be handled directly: find the source of the pressure and do something about it. With the complex composition the direct move does not work. You have to take the image apart into elements first, understand the degrees of freedom, establish which of the three forces can be changed at all and which one is fixed, and only then propose a movement that shifts the whole construction while keeping its internal balance rather than tearing it.

Symmetry inside the image carries information of its own

The kind of symmetry a person builds into their description tells you what sort of resolution is available.

When a conflict is described as mirrored, both sides wanting the same thing and both equally unwilling to give ground, that is symmetry by reflection. Resolution here usually takes one shared move that applies to both sides at once, because anything given to one side alone visibly breaks the mirror.

When the sides want different things, one wanting control and the other wanting quiet, there is no mirror solution. The first question is whether the two are balanced at all. If what differs in form turns out to be equal in weight and significance, you are looking at symmetry by balance, and the resolution has to be assembled out of concessions that differ in form while matching in weight.

When there is no balancing at all and one side in the image plainly outweighs the other, that is asymmetry. Then the work is with the imbalance itself, and looking for an equal exchange wastes the time of everyone in the room.

None of this is visible in a list of positions. It only becomes visible when you keep the picture whole.

Why the composition usually goes missing on the way to head office

Here is where a foreign company selling into Russia loses more than a local one does, and the loss has nothing to do with the market itself.

The composite image is formed by whoever sits closest to the situation: a local sales manager, a distributor, a country lead. It is spoken in Russian, usually in a conversation rather than in a document. Then it travels. Someone extracts the facts, translates them and sends three bullet points to another country. The elements survive that journey. The relations between them do not. Contrast, weight, the direction each force comes from, the symmetry holding the picture together: all of it is exactly what a summary is designed to remove.

The route matters too. A large share of qualified contact in Russia runs through messengers, and a meaningful part of it through voice messages rather than email threads. A voice message keeps composition almost perfectly. It carries the order in which the forces were named, the pauses, which element the speaker returned to twice. A CRM field keeps a sentence. If your evidence about the Russian market consists entirely of CRM fields and translated digests, you are working with elements from which the arrangement has already been stripped.

There is a second difference from the home market, and it cuts the other way. At home much of the structuring is done for you by machinery: survey panels, category dashboards, syndicated studies that turn what people say into countable units. Most of that machinery is thin or simply unavailable for a Russian audience, so far more of your evidence arrives as conversation. Treat that as an advantage. A survey answer preserves the element and discards how it stood in relation to the rest. A conversation preserves the composition, provided nobody flattens it before it reaches the person making decisions.

The practical instruction is short. Ask for the phrase as it was said. Have the image translated as an image, rather than paraphrased into business language. Keep the recording. When customer research in Russia is built this way, the composite pictures reach you intact, and the diagnosis stops being a guess made from bullet points.

Degrees of freedom are a budget question before they are a psychological one

Of all the properties of a composition, degrees of freedom is the one that pays for itself fastest in market entry work.

A picture of the Russian situation typically contains forces of very different mobility. Price pressure from local competitors is real and immovable by you. Product specification and packaging are often fixed by head office and can be argued with, slowly. Payment and delivery arrangements may be constrained from outside entirely. Positioning, the choice of channel, the pages you build, the structure of the Yandex Direct account: these you can change this month.

Asking which forces are free before proposing anything sorts the whole conversation. It also prevents the most expensive failure in this kind of work, where months go into arguing with the one element that was never going to move, while the elements that were free sat untouched. A market entry plan is largely an answer to that question written down: here is the composition, here is what is fixed in it, here is where the movement will come from.

How to work with a complex image without breaking the balance

When somebody hands you a multi-element picture of their situation, the temptation is to grab the first element you know how to fix and offer a solution for it. Doing that breaks the balance of the composition and creates new tension elsewhere, usually a few weeks later and usually in a place nobody is watching.

It is more useful to clarify the whole picture first. How many forces are acting? Where does each come from? Is the connection between them smooth or rhythmic, symmetrical or not? Which element does the speaker keep returning to? Only after that does it make sense to propose a movement, and the movement should account for the composition as a whole rather than for one fragment of it.

The same holds in self-observation, including corporate self-observation. If your internal state, or the company’s account of its position, comes out as a single image, trust its simplicity and resist the urge to complicate it artificially. If it unfolds into a composition of several elements acting at the same time, the search for “the one main cause” and the attempt to deal with that alone will fail, because the remaining elements go on pulling in their own directions. Write all the elements out separately and look at what connects them before taking hold of any one of them.

One note is not a melody

A single note is not a melody. What makes a melody is not the sum of the notes but how they relate to each other in time and in pitch. Metaphor works the same way. Taking an image apart into separate signals matters, and stopping there means missing the point of it.

The meaning frequently lives in the law that holds the elements together rather than in the elements themselves. That is true of a complaint from a client, of a report from a country team, and of the story a company tells itself about why the Russian market is difficult.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Как несколько метафор складываются в композицию