Analogical Thinking: How to Connect Ideas Across Fields

You have probably watched someone in a meeting lean back and say, “Oh, this is basically just like that other thing” - and felt a quiet sting. How did they see that? Why didn’t you?

Here is the part nobody tells you: that move is not a gift you are born with. It is a small set of repeatable habits. By the end of this article, you will have the exact mental steps and a few drills to build them.

Why this matters

The people who seem effortlessly creative are not running a different brain. They are running a different question, many times a day.

Connecting ideas across fields is what lets you:

• Understand something hard fast, by mapping it onto something you already know.
• Explain a complex idea so anyone gets it in one sentence.
• Find a fresh solution by borrowing one that already works somewhere else.

This is the engine behind most breakthroughs, most great explanations, and most “how did they think of that?” moments. And it is trainable.

A few words, defined plainly

Before the good stuff, four quick terms so nothing trips you up later.

• Domain - a field or area of life. Cooking is a domain. Banking is a domain. Football, biology, music - each is a domain.
• Analogy - saying “A is like B” because they share the same structure (the way the parts relate), even when the surface looks totally different.
• Lateral thinking - attacking a problem from a sideways, unexpected angle instead of pushing straight ahead. The term comes from psychologist Edward de Bono.
• Cross-pollination - borrowing a solution that already works in one field and planting it in another.

Surface vs. structure: the one idea that unlocks everything

Beginners connect things by surface - how they look. “A football and an orange are both round.” True, but useless.

Experts connect by structure - how the parts work together. Cognitive scientists Dedre Gentner and Keith Holyoak, who study analogy, showed that real insight comes from structural mapping: matching relationships, not appearances.

Compare the two:

• Surface match (weak): apple is like an orange - both round, both fruit.
• Structure match (strong): a heart pumps blood through the body; a pump pushes water through pipes. Same relationship, completely different domain.

So the heart is “like” a pump - not because they look alike, but because the relationship is identical: a central organ pushing fluid through a branching network. Once you see that, everything you know about pumps (pressure, blockages, valves) becomes a tool for understanding hearts.

The key move: Ask “What is doing what to what?” Then go find another field where the same thing happens.

How to actually do analogical thinking

Here is the move in three steps. It works for understanding something hard, explaining something to others, or finding a fresh idea.

1. Strip it to roles. Describe your thing in plain relationship words. Forget the specific names. Instead of “the customer waits in the support queue,” say: “items pile up faster than one worker can clear them.”
2. Ask the bridge question. “Where else does this exact thing happen?” Items piling up faster than they clear - that is a traffic jam, a clogged drain, a supermarket checkout, a kettle boiling over.
3. Borrow the solution. How do those fields fix it? Supermarkets open a second till (add capacity). Drains use a wider pipe. Traffic uses on-ramp metering (slow the inflow). Now you have three real options for your support queue.

A real case: hospitals borrowing from Formula 1

In the early 2000s, doctors at a London hospital had a problem: handing a fragile patient from surgery to intensive care was error-prone. Information got dropped in the chaos.

So they studied Formula 1 pit crews. Different domain entirely - motorsport - but the same structure: a fast, high-stakes transfer of something fragile between teams, where a dropped detail can be fatal.

They borrowed the pit-stop checklist and the choreographed roles. Handover errors fell. That is cross-pollination in action: the answer already existed, just in another world.

Lateral thinking and de Bono’s “PO”

Edward de Bono argued that our minds run in grooves - like rain carving the same channel down a hill. Normal logical thinking just deepens the groove. Lateral thinking jumps to a new channel on purpose.

His most famous tool is provocation, signalled by the word “PO.” You make a statement that is absurd or impossible, then ask what useful idea it sparks. The statement is a stepping stone, not the destination.

For example: “PO: cars have square wheels.” Absurd. But it forces a thought - a square wheel would need a suspension that rises and falls predictably with each edge. Which is exactly the idea behind adaptive suspension that pre-adjusts for the road ahead. The silly seed grew a real plant.

Borrowing from nature: biomimicry

Biomimicry means copying nature’s designs, because evolution has spent millions of years solving engineering problems. It is cross-pollination from the biggest research lab there is.

• The bullet train’s boom. Japan’s Shinkansen made a loud “boom” exiting tunnels. Engineer Eiji Nakatsu studied the kingfisher, whose beak slices into water with almost no splash, and reshaped the train’s nose. Result: quieter, faster, and less power used.
• Velcro. George de Mestral noticed burrs stuck to his dog’s fur after a walk - tiny hooks gripping loops. He carried that structure into fabric, and Velcro was born.
• Self-cleaning surfaces. The lotus leaf repels dirt with microscopic bumps. That structure became self-cleaning paints and fabrics.

Notice the pattern every time: a person paid attention to an ordinary thing, asked “what role is this playing?”, and carried the structure into a far-away domain.

Combinatorial play: new ideas are old parts in new pairs

Most new ideas are not invented from nothing. They are two existing things joined for the first time.

Writer Steven Johnson calls promising new combinations the “adjacent possible.” Einstein called his own method “combinatorial play.” The phone plus the camera plus the internet became the smartphone. The coffee shop plus the workspace became the co-working café.

This is why wide reading feeds connection. Your brain can only combine parts it actually holds, and reading actively rather than passively is what gets those parts onto your shelf in the first place. If you only stock one domain, you can only make same-domain combinations. Read across cooking, history, sport, and code, and you stock your shelf with mismatched parts nobody else has paired.

Forced connections: a tool for when nothing comes

When your mind is blank, force it. Pick your problem, then pick a random word or object, and demand a link. The randomness breaks the groove. It sits alongside other techniques for generating ideas on demand when inspiration refuses to show up.

Say the problem is “make my emails get replies,” and the random word is “garden”:

• Gardens need regular small care → send short, frequent emails.
• You remove weeds → cut the filler sentences.
• Plants need light and space → one clear ask, plenty of white space.

Three usable ideas from a word that had nothing to do with email. That is the point.

Common misconceptions

“Creative people just wait for inspiration to strike.” Reality: connections rarely arrive on their own. The people who seem effortlessly creative are deliberately running the bridge question - “what is this like elsewhere?” - over and over. Treat it as a habit you trigger, not a mood you wait for.

“You either have the knack for connecting ideas or you don’t.” Reality: the skill is mechanical, and mechanical things can be trained. People get stuck for one of two fixable reasons: they store facts as isolated lumps with no relationship labels, or they never ask the bridge question.

“A good analogy has to look like the thing it explains.” Reality: the best analogies look nothing alike. The heart and the pump, the hospital and the pit crew - the surfaces are wildly different. It is the relationship underneath that matches.

How to use this: four drills

Pick one and do it today. Speed matters more than polish.

1. Role-strip drill. Take something you read this week. Rewrite it in pure relationship words, removing all proper names - for example, “a small group controls access to a scarce thing.” Then name two other domains where that same relationship appears.
2. Bridge question x3. Take one current task. Ask “where else does this happen?” and list three different fields. For each, write down one thing that field does to solve it that you could steal.
3. Random-word forcing. Pick any object near you right now. Connect it to a problem you have, using at least three separate links, like the garden example above. Don’t judge - just generate.
4. PO provocation. Write one absurd reversal of a belief in your field - “PO: my customers pay me to read my emails.” Then mine two real ideas from it, and say the best one out loud in a single clear sentence. This trains connecting and expressing at once.

Conclusion

If you remember one thing, make it this: you cannot connect ideas you haven’t stored and labelled. Read widely, tag the underlying relationship when you learn it, then deliberately ask “where else does this happen?” That one question is the whole engine.

The connection skill rests on something quieter underneath it - the way your brain bundles knowledge into reusable patterns in the first place. Those bundles have a name (schemas), and learning to build them on purpose is what turns a shelf of scattered facts into a workshop of spare parts you can recombine at will. That is where the real leverage hides.