Forced analogies are a tool that is very widely used in creativity and consists in establishing forced relations among the characteristics, attributes, and adjectives that describe a normally randomly chosen topic or concept, and our creative challenge.
It involves finding initially unapparent forced relations between the randomly chosen theme or concept and our creative focus by answering the question: what do they have in common, what similarities do they have?
The aim is to break with logical thought and stimulate lateral thinking in order to find new connections.
This involves the following steps:
1. Select a topic and look for information before beginning.
2. Define the adjectives, characteristics or attributes that identify the world selected.
3. Draw a two-column or "T"-shaped diagram.
4. Write the adjectives identified in point 2 in the left column.
5. Look for the "forced" relations among each of the attributes and the creative challenge and write them in the right column to find "Eureka!" connections.
6. Repeat this with other topics or words selected at random in order to find new analogies.
This tool is very useful in generating a large number of divergent ideas.
