7 Follow-up Questions to Leverage Analogies

I love analogies, which I may have mentioned once or twice, maybe three times.

Why is that?

Because analogies yield tremendous impact for imagining innovative ideas, over and over again.

Here’s a big question when it comes to analogies: once you’ve identified an analogy (or multiples) for all (or part) of your organization, how do you leverage them to create a disproportionate number of innovative ideas?

That’s where the next questions you ask after identifying an analogy come into play.

Here are seven analogy follow-up questions Brainzooming uses with clients to turn good analogies into great idea generators. The variation of any of the questions you select may differ based on the type of analogies that you’ve identified.

• How would OUR ANALOGY address this opportunity or issue?
• How would we apply what OUR ANALOGY does to what we do?
• How would we apply how OUR ANALOGY does things to how we do things?
• How would OUR ANALOGY run our organization? 
• What things did OUR ANALOGY do to figure out their situation, and how can we apply the same things to our organization?
• What best practices does OUR ANALOGY embrace, and how can we incorporate them into our operation?
• What are the lessons learned for OUR ANALOGY, and where could we apply them?

Obviously, you needn’t use all of these questions to generate a bunch of innovative ideas. Using even one of the questions will lead to imagining more intriguing possibilities from your analogy. – Mike Brown

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The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding their strategic options and creating innovative plans they can efficiently implement. Call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can help you enhance your brand’s innovation strategy and implementation success.