Analogical Thinking: A Way To Produce Creative Ideas
Through the use of analogy, human beings have come up with many innovative ideas and creative solutions to problems. Here’s how you can…
Photo by Rachel Davis on Unsplash
Through the use of analogy, human beings have come up with many innovative ideas and creative solutions to problems. Here’s how you can apply analogical thinking to your life and work.
As a kid growing up in the 80s in Finglas, a suburb of Dublin City, we’d play in the grounds of an old farmhouse that stood in the middle of the housing estate. It was locally known as The Black House Community Centre, but we called it The Blacker. It was kip. A freezing cold run-down old place where teenagers would hang out in the dark, and beer cans, broken glass and dog shit would gather in corners. We’d steal matches from our dads and light fires in a recess at the back. There was a strong smell of piss there too. I can still smell it now.
Wild grasses and weeds grew everywhere on the grounds. We‘d pull bunches of sticklebacks (Cleavers) and throw them at each other for fun, and find them stuck inside the arms of jumpers and in the creases in our socks for days afterwards. The sticklebacks were clever little plants really, having evolved the ability to latch on to material like walls, trees, animal fur, and the backs of children’s jumpers.
Ordinarily, we adults don’t pass much heed to these things. But in 1941 as the engineer, George de Mestral walked in the Jura Mountains with his dog, the clever ability of a similar plant, the Xanthium Strumarium, to attach its seed pods to his clothes captured his interest. Little did he realise, that this determined little seed pod would be the focus of a fifteen-year obsession, and the foundation for what would become a multimillion-dollar business.
George de Mestral, Engineer & Inventor
de Mestral was born into a middle-class Swiss family in June 1907. His father, Albert was a civil engineer and no doubt had a significant influence on the developing mind of young George. As a youngster, he showed his creative abilities by designing and patenting a toy aeroplane at age 12. de Mestral attended the highly respected Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne on the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland where he studied engineering. Completing his studies, he secured employment in a Swiss engineering company where he honed his technical skills.
De Mestral also enjoyed hunting in the mountains and on one particular occasion in 1941, as the story goes, he was prompted to investigate the means by which the stubborn cockleburs adhered to his clothes. Upon examining the seed pod under a microscope he noticed hundreds of tiny hooks that covered the outer husk. It’s likely that de Mestral required many exposures to the stubborn cocklebur to prompt his inquiry, however, given his inventive mind, he somehow made a connection between what he observed and its possible future commercial use.
George de Mestral
He thought that if he could somehow employ the principle used by the cocklebur to fabricate a synthetic fastening system, he would have a solution to the problems occurring with conventional fasteners of the time. De Mestral conceptualised what he wanted to create, but coming up with a practical design took considerable time. Clothing manufacturers failed to take him seriously and he encountered many practical challenges in bringing his idea to life. After many attempts, he eventually found a clothing manufacturer in Lyon, France who was willing to work with him. Together they combined the toughness of nylon with cotton to create the first working prototype.
With the new material, he was able to recreate the tiny microscopic hooks he’d observed under a microscope all those years before. Proving his concept, he soon after applied and received a patent for his invention and launched his manufacturing business which he named Velcro, a combination of the French words “velours” (velvet) and “crochet” (hook).
It took nearly fifteen years of research before he was finally able to successfully reproduce the natural fastening system he had seen on the Xanthium strumarium seed pods, but he stuck to his idea — a testament to his belief in the solution he had found.
George de Mestral’s 1957 Patent Application
De Mestral’s Analogical Thinking Process Took Time To Catch On
Despite its widespread use today, Velcro was not an immediate commercial success for de Mestral. However, by the early 1960s and the race to reach the moon, it seems that Velcro was in the right place at the right time. With the developing needs of the aerospace industry and the successful use of Velcro by NASA, the clothing and sportswear industries also realised the possibilities that de Mestral’s product presented. Soon Velcro was selling over 60 million meters of hook-and-loop fastener per year, and de Mestral became a multimillionaire.
Whether he realised it or not, de Mestral used what today we term “analogical thinking” or analogical reasoning; the process of finding a solution to a problem by finding a similar problem with a known solution and applying that solution to the current situation.
An analogy is a comparison between two objects, or systems of objects, that highlights respects in which they are thought to be similar. Analogical reasoning is any type of thinking that relies upon an analogy 5
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
What Is Analogical Thinking?
The world-renowned writer and philosopher, Edward de Bono, creator of the term “lateral thinking”, says that the analogy technique for generating ideas is a means to get some movement going, to start a train of thought. The challenge for us, when presented with a difficult problem, is that we can become hemmed in by traditional habitual thinking. Thinking laterally through the use of analogy helps to bring about a shift away from this habitual thinking.
In his book, Lateral Thinking: A Textbook Of Creativity first published almost fifty years ago, de Bono suggests that lateral thinking, of which thinking by analogy is a method, is the opposite of traditional vertical thinking. Although he also says that both lateral thinking and vertical thinking can work together rather than in opposition.
Thinking by analogy helps to bring about creativity and insight and is a system of thought that can be learned. The analogy is a simple story that becomes an analogy when it is compared to the current problematic condition. The story employed must have a process that can we can follow, that we can easily understand and apply to the present circumstance.
Analogical Thinking Experiment
In 1980, Mary Gick and Keith Holyoak at the University of Michigan investigated the role of analogical thinking in psychological mechanisms that underlie creative insight. In their study (PDF), they suggested that anecdotal reports of creative scientists and mathematicians suggested that their development of new theories often depended on noticing and applying an analogy drawn from different domains of knowledge. Analogies cited included the hydraulic model of the blood circulatory system and the planetary model of the atomic structure of matter.
Using analogy to solve problems
The Experiment
In their experiment, Gick and Holyoak presented subjects first with a military story. In the story, an army General wishes to capture a fortress located in the centre of a country to which there are several access roads. All roads have been mined so that while small groups of men can pass through safely, a large number will detonate the mines. A full-scale direct attack is therefore impossible. The General’s solution is to divide his army into small groups, send each group to the head of a different road, and have the groups converge simultaneously on the fortress.
Participants are then asked to find a solution to the following medical problem.
A doctor is faced with a patient who has a malignant tumour in his stomach. It is impossible to operate on the patient, but unless the tumour is destroyed the patient will die. There is an x-ray that can be used to destroy the tumour but unfortunately, at the required intensity, the surrounding healthy tissue will also be destroyed. At a lower intensity, the rays are harmless to healthy tissue, but they will not affect the tumour either. What type of procedure might be used to destroy the tumour with the rays, and at the same time avoid killing the healthy tissue?
The Results
The researchers were interested to know how participants would represent the analogical relationship between the military story and the problem to generate a workable solution. For participants who didn’t receive the military story, only 10% managed to generate the solution to the problem. This percentage rose to 30% for those who received the story in advance of the problem. Interestingly, the result climbed to 75% when participants read more than one analogous story.
Results from the study provide experimental evidence that solutions to problems can be generated using an analogous problem from a
very different domain. However, the researchers caution against the assumption that solving problems by analogy may not deliver positive results where the problems are more complex.
Success is also dependant on the individual’s exposure to similar conditions in the past, with increased exposure likely to yield more consistent results in solving similar problems.
My Personal Analogical Thinking Story
My sons are aged 11 and 12, and they regularly find challenges with mathematics, just like most kids do. Mathematics is an abstract system of thinking and I can understand the difficulty children may have from time to time getting to grips with it. The terminology is alien and they need to build out concepts and schemas for what is essentially a new and complex language.
They are learning how to work with fractions, percentages and ratios and most of the time they navigate their way successfully, but occasionally they get stumped and ask for help. When they do I always bring in the apple analogy.
One maths question asked my son to divide an amount of money between John and Edward in the ratio of 12 to 9 respectively. My son reckoned that wasn’t a fair split. I told him John worked harder than Edward and we proceeded.
I asked him first to consider the amount of money as an apple and asked him what we would need to do to share the apple so that John got 12 pieces and Edward got 9. After a pause, he correctly said; slice the apple into 21 equal pieces, give John 12 and Edward 9. So now, I said, can we split this money up in the same way?
Ping! We were on the pigs back.
I always use the apple analogy for the kids’ maths problems and it works very well.
Final Thoughts on Applying Analogical Thinking
About 10 years ago my business was in the toilet and I was under enormous financial stress. Every day was a fight with myself and everyone around me. Most days I managed things as well as possible, but other days I was beaten. I can safely say, that no amount of input from those who could see what I couldn’t, no amount analogical thinking would have helped me. I was in a prolonged state of hyperactivity and awareness of the problems. Neurochemically my brain could simply not operate in my favour. When I look back now I realise that those set of circumstances simply needed to burn themselves out.
Actively trying to solve an apparent problem can often be problematic in itself. By virtue of our focus on the problem, we often can’t see the solutions and there’s no amount of thinking can relieve us from the predicament. Analogical thinking has a firm place in creative pursuits, however, I believe it can only be successfully employed when we are in a calm and collected state of mind.
Therefore, our job in performing to the highest level no matter what our domain of expertise, is to cultivate a stable and measured state of mind. In that place, we can encourage access to parts of the mind that lie beyond our conscious thought and receive answers to life’s most complex problems and maybe even come up with a multimillion-dollar business!
Thanks for taking the time to read my stuff. Every morning you’ll find me sharing a new thought on life, art, work, creativity, the self and the nature of reality on The Reflectionist. I write also on The Creative Mind. If you like what I’m creating, join my email list to receive the weekly Sunday Letters