How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

FIND AN ANALOGY

---

One more way to spark new thinking is to seek out stimulating analogies for the
issue you’re working on, by making use of interesting things you encounter
outside your normal frame of reference—whether you’re observing an
unfamiliar workplace or wandering along a new street. A few simple questions
can help you extract ideas from the strangest places, once you get into the habit
of asking them more often. Whenever you come across something thought-
provoking, ask yourself:
How is this thing you’ve noticed 
similar
to the topic you’re working on?
What’s 
different
about it? And what’s most striking about that?
What might that suggest as an idea for you to explore?
For example, suppose the issue on your mind right now is the excessive
workload your team’s currently facing. Everyone’s worn down. You’re catching
your breath while having dinner in a buzzing restaurant with an open kitchen,
and you reflect on those analogy-seeking questions while you’re waiting for
your food. First, you notice that the kitchen staff are deluged with customer
orders, like your own team. What’s 
different
is that staff in the restaurant seem
pretty calm, despite the demands they’re facing. And while your team allocates
work depending on who’s got spare capacity, each person in the kitchen has a
clear job to do: some make salads, others hot food or desserts. What does that
make you think? You consider that maybe you could do more to tag each team
member to particular types of requests, so that everyone isn’t flipping from one
thing to another all the time. You remember the advice on “batching” tasks from
Chapter 4
, and realize that this might reduce people’s stress. An idea takes shape
in your mind.
Peggy, the freelance art director, finds that certain websites often inspire her
when she browses with those analogy-seeking questions in mind. “I find it useful
sometimes to flip through certain blogs, Getty Images, GigPosters, that sort of
thing. I like to see what thoughts they provoke.” One day, as she was looking for
a final piece of inspiration on her air freshener ad campaign, she came across an
old-fashioned botanical rose diagram. The rose connected with the traditional
idea of a scented spray, but it was a very technical diagram. It wasn’t initially
obvious how it related to her campaign. But something made her pause. She
noticed the leaves of this particular rose looked like boxing gloves. That in turn
sparked a memory of the last time she’d been pruning her own roses, in which

---

she remembered them bobbing and diving in the wind. Suddenly she had a much
better idea for her air freshener advertisement: a rose with boxing gloves,
combining antibacterial power and scent. “I knew I’d got it. Sometimes it just
takes looking at the issue in a completely different light, and being open to
whatever develops.”
So how did Peggy’s work on the air freshener ad campaign end? She smiles.
“The account director told me the rose with boxing gloves was ‘award-winning
work.’ And as a freelancer, 
that
is the kind of comment that leads to job
security.”