Chris Gash/theispot.com
Creativity is widely recognized as a cornerstone of long-term business success, yet many leaders find it frustratingly elusive. Research confirms the paradox: Nearly all executives view creativity as essential, but few are able to consistently generate and implement new and relevant ideas. How, then, can leaders spark fresh thinking in themselves and their teams?
When perception is reality, it’s time to flip the perception. Creativity doesn’t belong exclusively to artists, designers, professional “creatives,” or TED speakers. Nor is it something external and uncontrollable, striking only in rare moments of solitude or sudden inspiration. We are all born creative, and creative thinking can be reawakened and developed through deliberate practice. It can be embedded into everyday decision-making, strategy development, and innovation workflows.
Analogical thinking is an accessible path to cultivating creativity that is especially well suited to meeting modern business challenges. The approach involves spotting structural similarities between seemingly unrelated concepts and applying insights from one area (the source domain) to reimagine problems in another (the target domain). Analogical thinking isn’t just a clever technique; it lies at the heart of how humans learn, influencing everything from storytelling to biomimetic innovations to scientific breakthroughs. Despite analogical thinking’s potential, organizational leaders rarely harness it intentionally to solve problems and drive innovation. Here’s why they should.
Analogies Fuel Innovation
Well-constructed analogies provide conceptual scaffolding that allows leaders to see and approach issues in new ways. They’re especially useful for breaking out of the mental ruts we fall into when repeatedly solving problems with the same logic in the same domain.
A team of physicians at Grace Ormond Street Hospital in London resorted to analogical thinking when conceiving ways to improve the speed and accuracy of their emergency room patient handovers: They studied the choreography of Formula One pit crews. Like emergency room teams, pit crews operate in high-pressure environments where timing, role clarity, and communication must be flawless. The insights gained were revelatory: The hospital restructured handovers around clear role definitions, sequenced task flows, and focused, limited communication. The new protocol led to a 42% reduction in technical errors, a 49% drop in information omissions, and a reduction in the proportion of handovers with multiple errors from 39% to 11.5%.
Across industries, analogical thinking has fueled groundbreaking innovations. Network routing algorithms in telecommunications and logistics have been inspired by the foraging behavior of ant colonies, where the strongest pheromone trails indicate the most efficient paths. In another example, Airbnb reinvented travel accommodation by creating an experience analogous to staying with friends or family rather than mimicking hotels.
In each case, the key insight came not from copying another company but from importing a structure — the underlying pattern of roles, relationships, and flows — from a different context.
Why Analogical Thinking Works
Looking for analogies pushes us out of our default approaches to problem-solving and into a more observant mode where we are open to witnessing and marveling at seemingly unrelated connections. When we focus on the relationships and patterns behind a familiar situation, we can apply that same structure to a new and often more complex problem. This kind of thinking — moving from the concrete to the abstract and back again — is at the heart of creativity and can be applied consistently to generate novel ideas and innovations.
In organizations, providing space for and encouraging analogical thinking can help teams escape groupthink, open up fresh approaches to strategy, and create better collaboration across silos.
Four Ways of Cultivating Analogical Thinking
Despite the potential benefits, most leaders have never even considered reasoning by analogy, let alone implemented a process to apply this way of thinking in a structured manner. To help bridge this gap, I’ve drawn on my own and others’ research in this field to develop four ways managers and teams can get started with analogies.
1. Consume knowledge from distant fields. Encourage team members to cultivate genuine curiosity by venturing outside of their professional lanes — whether it be diving into biology, literary theory, physics, jazz improvisation, mythology, or stand-up comedy. The more varied (and seemingly unrelated) the input, the more fertile the ground becomes for surprising analogies to take root.
Start with a habit of asking questions: What are the core dynamics in this distant field? Who plays what role? How do relationships, flows, or constraints work there? Could any of that shed light on a challenge we’re grappling with? Think of it as mental tourism with a strategic twist.
In one study, my coauthor and I reviewed knowledge across fields to create a practical model for using analogies to spark creative ideas in supply chain management. We called this conceptual wanderlust: a disciplined approach to exploring far-flung knowledge, making organizations more innovative and better prepared for disruption. As with design thinking, the key is cycling between divergent thinking (casting the net wide — generating many raw ideas from distant domains) and convergent thinking (narrowing down — testing which ideas are both novel and useful).
Conceptual wanderlust significantly expands the pool of source domains from which novel and valuable insights can emerge. It can help teams break free from the gravitational pull of industry assumptions and tap into mental models that shake up stale thinking. Often, the most original business ideas don’t come from within the discipline; they arrive sideways, imported from a distant field.
2. Be playful. Creativity thrives on play, which is about ambiguity, experimentation, and the courage to get things “wrong.” Play disinhibits. New patterns and connections can emerge that more rigid analyses often overlook, when we playfully turn to other domains and ask, “What if?”
But there are many ways to unlock a playful mindset. Improv theater workshops have been found to be effective at helping workers in a range of industries adapt to unique situations and be more open to change. Similarly, role-swapping games can encourage individuals to approach problems from new perspectives, reveal blind spots, and highlight interdependencies. When a manager “becomes” a regulator or competitor, they import that role’s priorities, constraints, and flows into their own context. Even seemingly silly constraints can create analogical leaps. Asking a group to “design a supply chain that works underwater,” for example, forces them to borrow from marine ecosystems or diving gear. The analogy to aquatic life and survival reframes assumptions about flexibility, adaptation, and redundancy.
Analogical insights often arise from what psychologist Robert Bjork calls “desirable difficulties” — the unfamiliar, uncertain situations that force us to adapt. Just as musicians grow by practicing in difficult keys, professionals expand their creative range when asked to think in new modes. An organization’s equivalent of playing in a different key could be, for example, rotating team members into different roles or teams, cross-pollinating disciplines, or using reframing exercises that disrupt habitual logic. Real innovation comes not from optimizing what we already know but from imaginative and playful thinking that stems from activities that defy business as usual and entertain the seemingly silly and irrational. In business, as in science, meaningful leaps often happen where logic ends and play begins.
3. Create safe spaces for speculative thinking. Analogical thinking thrives where there is psychological safety and freedom from the rational logic that performance-based metrics reinforce and that rarely fosters imaginative thought. Leaders can push back against this limiting framework by carving out protected time and cognitive space for open-ended ideation — spaces where the objective is to pursue unexpected, sometimes messy, connections.
Spotify’s Hack Week offers a vivid example: For one week each year, employees pause their regular work to pitch and prototype ideas outside their usual domains. This permission to play and create has led to innovations — such as Discover Weekly, a personalized playlist that introduces users to new music — born not from direct mandates but from sanctioned mental wandering. Similarly, Atlassian asks employees to dedicate part of their time to passion projects and runs a quarterly ShipIt Day (a 24-hour innovation sprint) during which anyone can pitch an idea and build something new. Over time, these creative initiatives can lead to valuable developments off the core road map: product enhancements, internal tooling improvements, and novel features.
There are countless ways companies can normalize playful detours and speculative thinking. Imagine hosting regular gatherings where each team member brings in one surprising idea, metaphor, or image from outside the industry — a fragment of mythology, a chess move, a gardening trick — and together the group maps it onto a current challenge. Or invite teams to recast a stubborn problem as a fable, a play, or even a sporting event. When an inventory bottleneck becomes a tragic hero or a pricing dispute turns into a tennis rally, the analogy makes old issues suddenly strange, fresh, and more malleable.
The point is to make safe spaces for structured wandering. When companies legitimize intellectual detours, they expand their odds of stumbling across analogies that may initially appear eccentric or tangential but later prove to be transformative. With a little encouragement, the office can become less like a factory of tidy answers and more like a studio of imaginative experiments.
4. Evaluate your insights. If an analogy reflects only surface-level similarities between two concepts, teams risk anchoring themselves to flawed assumptions and misguided solutions. Worse, poorly chosen analogies can distort how a problem is framed, obscuring deeper causal mechanisms and leading decision makers astray. Evaluating the fit of the analogy or source domain and determining its potential to yield valuable insights is part of the practice. Without scrutiny, even the most creative or playful comparisons between distant concepts can backfire, offering more illusion than illumination.
Formula One pit crews were a strong analogy for the doctors at Grace Ormond Street Hospital because both domains involve high-pressure handovers where timing, role clarity, and flawless execution matter. The structural parallels (sequenced flows, defined roles, and disciplined communication) mapped cleanly from pit lane to hospital ward, delivering measurable improvements in patient safety. In contrast, leaders who frame business strategy as a war to be won are often relying on a weak analogy. Despite the intuitive similarities (competition, leadership, tactics), it breaks down when mapped wholesale to business. War is typically a finite game with victory conditions, while business is often an infinite game where adaptation, collaboration, and reinvention usually matter more than “winning.” The surface resemblance obscures the structural mismatch (finite versus infinite dynamics), potentially leading companies to overemphasize short-term battles instead of long-term resilience.
That’s why rigorous evaluation is a key phase in analogical reasoning. It’s not enough for an analogy to feel clever or intuitive; it must also be structurally robust. This requires an interrogation of the assumptions beneath an analogy: Do the relationships between elements in the source domain map meaningfully onto the target domain? Are there hidden mismatches or oversimplifications? Teams should actively stress-test analogies across contexts and conditions, asking how well the comparison holds up under different scenarios and over time.
One approach is to translate the analogy into clear, testable propositions. This can sharpen their logic and relevance, revealing whether insights lead to actionable strategies or simply rhetorical appeal.
This evaluative mindset must be treated as an intentional and recurring step, not a quick gut check at the end. Integrating this phase into brainstorming or innovation sprints helps filter out seductive but misleading ideas early, before they calcify into plans. This interplay of divergent and convergent thinking is core to the process of ensuring that analogies have a strong fit and yield deeply valuable insights. In this way, organizations can balance the energy of imaginative thinking with precision and rigor, turning analogical leaps into grounded, meaningful innovations.
The question isn’t whether analogical thinking can work; it already does. The real question is whether leaders can make it part of their strategic playbooks. Just as organizations build cultures around customer centricity or data-driven decision-making, they can cultivate a culture of analogy — one where distant ideas are deliberately brought together, creative friction is welcomed, and lateral thinking becomes second nature. Those who do this won’t just stumble upon the occasional clever insight. They’ll develop teams that habitually connect the dots across domains, reframe problems in novel ways, and generate insights that linear analyses could overlook.