Forget one-and-done analogies to solve hard problems

In the 1940s, psychologist Karl Duncker puzzled participants with the infamous “radiation problem”: destroy a tumor with a lethal ray without harming surrounding tissue. Few solved it. Then came an unlikely breakthrough: expose subjects to a parallel story about a general dividing troops among multiple roads to converge on a fortress simultaneously. Suddenly, solutions flooded in. The lesson? A single, domain-adjacent analogy—still familiar—doubled success rates. But two or more analogies from vastly different scenarios tripled them. By guiding solvers to multiple outside stories, researchers forced deep structural thinking and defeated the urge to apply narrow rules.

This approach destroys the intuition that one familiar example is enough. You have to seek three or more distant analogies—drawn from unrelated teams, rivers, software load-balancing—to see the parallel patterns that can crack a wicked problem. When you layer these analogies, your mind must extract the core mechanism—multiple small forces converging, fail-safe loops, feedback regulation—and adapt it creatively to your specific challenge. Supercharging creativity requires not one, but many doors to new ways of seeing.

Today’s complex problems demand this outside-view mindset. Whether persuading a reluctant audience, optimizing a website’s traffic, or designing a healthy workplace, if you rely on a single case study from your industry, you’ll likely miss transformative insights. Instead, interrogate structures across biology, engineering, ancient strategy, or unexpected artifacts from your personal life. Each fresh analogy stretches your mental canvas and reveals a strategy you never would have imagined.

You’ve captured your core challenge in a sentence, and listed three distant domains—great. Now, draw a quick two-column matrix on paper: your problem on one side, each domain on the other. Jot down how each domain handles pressure, distributes forces, or feeds back to stabilize the system. As you cross-map these patterns, note at least three ideas you hadn’t considered. Pick one, sketch a rough action plan, and test it this afternoon.