Successful product development often requires the co-operative efforts of members of multi-disciplinary teams. Improving the effectiveness of these efforts has primarily been approached through structural features of organisations and disciplinary representation on project teams. More recently, interpersonal communication across disciplinary boundaries has been recognised as problematic. Tacit familiarisation and colocation are often assumed to address communicative difficulties. Studies of collaborative work have identified the ability to effectively adopt the perspectives of others as essential to successful outcomes. This work reviews literature challenging traditional assumptions about communication and meaning, to show that difficulties may be deeply rooted in divergent beliefs and experiences that remain unaddressed in the course of normal work. Insights from cognitive linguistics are discussed, which reveal metaphor to be a central process in thought and understanding. The use of different metaphors can be seen to frame perception so that participants in situations may develop incompatible and incommensurable views. This study has focused on the development of a method for identifying aspects of divergent and unshared metaphorical structuring in the ways disciplinary professionals conceptualise about their work. The study has involved open interviews centring on disciplinary stereotypes, and informants' beliefs about essential aspects of their work. Texts generated were subsequently subjected to discourse analysis involving thematic content, elements of interpretative repertoires, and the use of narratives in discerning metaphorical themes. The work was exploratory in nature, involving a small number of informants. Significantly different themes were identified in informants' discourses which shed light on areas of disciplinary friction related by them. These themes are consistent with Dougherty's (1992) findings of differences in disciplinary 'thought worlds', but convey a richer understanding through their metaphorical nature. It is believed that exploration and discussion of metaphorical themes may be employed in future work to facilitate collaboration in multidisciplinary product development.