9 Illumination: Synectics

It’s true that many times Illumination happens in a sudden, unexpected way. However, it’s a bit misleading to think that we must simply sit and wait for Inspiration to strike. We can do many things to cultivate the bolt of lightning. Many of them we’ve already explored, by being open to experience in the Preparation phase, or by cultivating boredom and mind-wandering during Incubation.

And when we need inspiration to strike, there are ways to fuel the process, but they have to be unorthodox and maybe even a little weird. We have to get our brain out of its usual thinking patterns. Usually just sitting down at the desk and grinding away at the problem is counterproductive and leads to frustration, because that isn’t our mind’s natural way of making new connections.

Instead, our objective with Inspiration can be spurred by changing the way we’re thinking about our creative problem. We’ll explore one such way to seek inspiration in this chapter.

Introducing Synectics

Let’s look closer at the research of William J. J. Gordon. In his chapter, “Metaphor and Invention,” from The Creativity Question. Gordon outlines a series of activities he calls Synectics.

Through a series of experiments, Gordon discovered that using metaphors in a deliberate way could help bring about the inspiration moment a little sooner. He writes,

The pure research that led to being explicit about metaphorical mechanisms was launched in the hope of being able to evoke creative process with more reliability than could be expected on the basis of probability alone. That research showed that you didn ‘t have to wait passively ‘ till the creative muse struck , that there were definite metaphorical weapons with which you could hunt and track down the muse.

Synectics uses a series of comparisons between unlike things that force our brain to reframe what we’re thinking about and to see it in new ways. Through this, we give our brain new neural pathways to make those new creative connections. Writing about his creation of the synectics technique, Gordon states,

The traditional view of creativity was completely elitist. It embraced words such as “inspiration” and “genius” and accepted the fact that “you had to be born with it.” In the face of such militant romanticism, this author manifested an impious stubbornness when, over twenty-five years ago, he initiated research directed toward increasing the creative innovation/learning output of individuals and groups. This research resulted in the synectics technique for the conscious use of metaphor in problem-solving situations requiring innovative viewpoints.

Synectics is a method where we force our minds to see an old thing in a new way. It can be something we’ve been familiar with our whole lives and never considered in a different way. Or, for our purposes in the creative process, it can be a way to take the idea we’re working on and force our minds to reconsider it by comparing it to other unrelated things.

As Gordon states, “Synectics research revealed that the most important element in innovative problem-solving was making the familiar strange because breakthroughs depend on ‘strange’ new contexts by which to view a ‘familiar’ problem.” By looking at your idea in comparison with other things—unrelated, disparate things—we see different qualities of it, different ways the idea can work, different contexts where it might work in an unexpected way.

As an example, Gordon shares the story of Harvey, a 16th Century scientist, who followed the common belief that blood flowed from the heart to the body not through a particular circulation but instead “surging in and out like the tides of the sea.” But Harvey happened to observe a fish’s heart still beating after the body had been opened up for preparing a meal. Instead of seeing the blood flowing like a tidal flow, he saw the movement of the heart muscle, which reminded him of the action of a pump. “The idea of the heart acting like a pump was most strange to him, and he had to break his ebb and flow connection to make room for his new pump connection. Harvey’s discovery, resulting from making the familiar strange, has saved countless lives by offering doctors an accurate account of the circulation of blood,” Gordon writes.

Thus, for Illumination to come more directly than waiting for it, we need to make the familiar strange (in other words, see a common idea or object in a new way–like seeing common sense as actually dead wrong, a couch no longer as a couch but as a boat, seeing your cat as the head of the house rather than you–ok, maybe that one is not such a stretch…).

Powerful Metaphor Types for Spurring Creativity

Gordon states the power of metaphor for spurring creativity very clearly:

The creative process depends on developing new contexts for viewing the old, familiar world, and metaphors constitute the basis for new contexts.

He outlines three kinds of metaphors that creative thinkers can use to change the context of our ideas and see them anew:

Direct analogy is saying one thing is like something else: an airplane is like a bird, etc.

Personal analogy is, through empathy, identifying with something outside ourself. Seeing yourself as a beam of positive energy, or as a potted plant in the corner, or as a kid locked inside an adult’s body.

Compressed conflict is a symbolic analogy, a close-coupled phrase where the words fight each other. Modern parlance might call this an oxymoron Jumbo shrimp, drowned duck, poor billionaire.

How Synectics works

In order to inspire new ideas and bring on the Illumination moment, the creative mind can use a series of metaphorical comparisons to try to see the problem in a new light.

Let’s say a company was working on a way to improve employee morale. They’d done their Preparation by holding some surveys and focus groups and read about trends in the modern workplace. They’d observed their employees and also relied on the passive Preparation of their years of management experience.

Then they’d sat with this information. Perhaps the leadership team had even had a meeting or two, and nothing new was coming of it–just the same old ideas like occasional retreats or doughnuts in the break room on Fridays.

So, to see the problem anew, all employees and all leadership members take on a Synectics exercise. Their task is to come up with, say, five metaphors to describe the workplace.

One employee’s list might read:

Our workplace is like:

1. a beehive.
2. a rugby match.
3. a junkyard
4. a weedy garden.
5. a broken record.

Another’s might read

Our workplace is like:

1. The Hunger Games
2. a racetrack
3. a dog park
4. a heavy metal mosh pit
5. Armageddon

The workers would then be asked to choose their top one or two metaphors that seemed to be the most accurate, and write out a few sentences as to why that metaphor is true for them. Using this data, the leadership would be able to see the issues more clearly and get new ideas about how to improve morale. In these fictional examples, perhaps the leadership team would begin to feel the environment of competition the leadership team had fostered had gone too far and was eroding a feeling of cameraderie.

But this can be done on an individual level as well. Perhaps you’re trying to use your phone less, to stop doomscrolling or checking work email off-hours or sleep better. Preparation might have included research on effects of smartphone addiction, methods to cut back on screen time, and some Incubation on phone avoidance while doing non-phone activities like taking a shower or driving (ahem). No new ideas seemed to arrive on what to try, so you could turn to synectics:

My phone is like:

1. a cigarette
2. handcuffs
3. an encyclopedia
4. a trade show floor
5. an airport

Similarly, exploring these metaphors and why they came to mind will help to see the issue in new ways that may give guidance on the goal of cutting back on phone screentime.