• Member
• August 3, 2025

Multiple Perspective Through Multiple Analogy

Unlocking Innovation: The "Multiple Perspective through Multiple Analogy" Technique

In today's rapidly evolving world, complex challenges often defy simple solutions. Traditional, single-perspective thinking can limit our ability to innovate and see the full picture. The "Multiple Perspective through Multiple Analogy" technique offers a powerful methodology to overcome these limitations, fostering breakthrough ideas and robust solutions by drawing insights from an incredibly diverse range of sources.

Why Multiple Perspectives and Analogies?

At its core, this approach recognizes that:

• Complexity Demands Diverse Views: Many significant challenges within any organization are inherently multidisciplinary. Optimal solutions require synthesizing knowledge from various fields, leveraging distributed expertise, and integrating diverse insights.

• Outside-In Thinking is Crucial: To anticipate and prepare for surprising eventualities, organizations must adopt an "outside-in thinking" approach. This involves looking beyond internal operations to understand external changes, trends, and even seemingly unrelated phenomena that could profoundly impact the core business or problem.

• Analogies Spark Creativity: Analogies are powerful stimuli for generating new ideas and solving design problems, often triggering breakthrough concepts. They allow us to transfer the "essence," structure, and relationships from a known "source domain" to an unknown "target domain," illuminating new aspects and perspectives.

• Distant Analogies Drive Originality: Research shows that the greatest potential for creative insights arises when the "source domain" is very distant or unrelated to the "target domain." These "far-field" analogies lead to more original and novel solutions.

How the Technique Works: The Process Flow

The "Multiple Perspective through Multiple Analogy" technique follows a structured, iterative process designed to systematically extract and apply insights:

1. Define the Target Domain/Challenge:

• Clearly articulate the specific problem, challenge, or area where innovation is needed. This is the "target domain."

• Example: Enhancing customer satisfaction in a service-delivery organization.

2. Identify Key Determinants of the Target Domain:

• Break down the challenge into its core components, functions, limitations, and desired outcomes.

3. Select Intermediate Domains (Bridging Analogies):

• Choose a set of "intermediate domains" that share conceptual similarities or comparable challenges with your target domain, but are not direct parallels. These act as crucial "bridging analogies" to manage the abstractness of distant sources.

• Examples: Improving logistics efficiency in e-commerce, enhancing patient experience in healthcare, optimizing energy consumption in large infrastructure.

4. Select Diverse Source Domains (Distant Analogies):

• Curate a wide array of "source domains" from highly diverse and often unrelated fields. The more varied the sources, the richer the perspectives generated.

• Examples: The Solar System, a symphony orchestra, a sports team, a forest ecosystem, a historical revolution, a market bazaar, a mobile phone, social media platforms, a surgical operation.

5. Map Source Domain Determinants to Intermediate Domains:

• For each selected source domain, identify its core principles, structures, relationships, and processes (its "determinants").

• Map these determinants onto the chosen intermediate domains. This step externalizes the mapping process and reveals how insights from distant sources can apply to analogous challenges.

6. Transfer Insights from Intermediate Domains to the Target Domain:

• Based on the new perspectives gained from the intermediate mapping, transfer these insights, structures, and relationships to your original target domain. This is where the novel ideas for your specific challenge emerge.

• Example: Insights from how a "Solar System" functions (centralized forces, predictable paths) mapped to "e-commerce logistics" (hub-and-spoke models, optimized routes) can then be applied to "enhancing customer satisfaction" (e.g., creating predictable service delivery schedules, centralized customer support).

7. Generate Ideas and Solutions:

• Facilitate brainstorming and ideation sessions to translate the transferred insights into concrete ideas and potential solutions for the target domain. These ideas will often possess a higher degree of originality.

8. Evaluate and Refine Ideas:

• Filter, evaluate, and refine the generated ideas based on feasibility, potential impact, alignment with organizational goals, and resource availability.

Applications

While proven effective in specialized contexts for generating innovation in rail operations, this versatile technique can be applied across various sectors for:

• Business Environment Analysis: Gaining a deeper understanding of market dynamics and competitive landscapes.

• Improving Customer Services: Developing novel approaches to enhance customer experience.

• Roadmapping: Strategic planning for future product development or organizational growth.

• Scenario Building: Exploring potential future states and preparing for various eventualities.

By systematically leveraging the power of multiple perspectives through diverse analogies, any organization can unlock new levels of creativity, overcome functional fixedness, and drive impactful innovation.