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When the imagination comes up with an analogous situation, perhaps as a fleeting image in the mind’s eye, it is analyzed in order to identify and extract the key, transferable principle.

The key principle of the pop-top drinks can, for example, was found in this manner from the way the seams of a banana skin can split and be peeled open without the need for an “opener.. A similar but not identical idea could probably have been found from considering the structure of a pea pods.

A) Stating the Problem as a PARADOX
Gordon stresses the crucial importance of first defining the very specific problem in the form of a conflict, a frustrated purpose or PARADOX, as he calls it — e.g. "The drinks can is easily opened although there is no can opener."

In this way, the problem and the subsequent search for a solution is narrowed down by identifying what might be described as driving and restraining forces — which is the common situation in the physical world, where, for example, hot-air balloons overcome gravity, motor-cycles overcome friction, and marketing ploys overcome sales resistance. Notice, too, that Gordon defines a problem in a positive way, not as a failure, but as a successfully resolved situation in which the desired action is taking place despite certain opposing forces.

Playing with the approach myself I thought about the common problem with worn windscreen wipers on a car, where small sections of the rubber blade edge fail, causing narrow arcs of un-cleaned glass to be left behind while the rest of the screen is crystal clear. My paradox was that the blade cleans all the glass although it has gaps in its edge — that was the situation I wanted to achieve.

B) Find the ANALOGY
Having stated my paradox, I then followed Gordon’s next step by trying to visualize the wiper somehow wiping the window surface properly, then let the image become fuzzy, generalized and un-specific — "something wiping — moving — back and forth — flopping about . . . "

I then asked my imagination, my creative mind: "Where in the plant world is there something like this?" After a while, magically, out of the misty mindscape of the imagination, came a hazy glimpse of a tree branch moving up and down in the wind, and blades of grass doing the same. Gordon calls this second step in the system the ANALOGY — because a specific useful metaphor has been spotted and, hopefully, the problem has already been solved, at least in principle.

C) Identify the UNIQUE ACTIVITY
The next step is to consider the analogy and draw out the UNIQUE ACTIVITY, the crucial transferable principle needed to solve the problem. In my experience, the unique activity was that as the branch, like a blade of grass, has a different stiffness and so bends differently when pushed down than when lifted up, so that the tip traces out two different arcs in the air.

D) Spot the EQUIVALENT
My EQUIVALENT, my practical solution, would be to make a wiper blade with a support that bent more easily in one direction than the other, so that it would in effect be "pushed" stiffly across the wind screen in the one direction, then "dragged" reluctantly back in the other direction — thereby causing each spot on the edge of the blade to trace different arcs going and coming, and greatly reducing the chance of any section being left un-wiped and dirty.

Although Synectics is a sophisticated and very structured idea generation technique, Gordon does stress that once its principles have been thoroughly understood, the method may be applied informally, as it was by the great inventors such as Archimedes.

To help choose among several possible ideas, some problem solvers rate them on a scale of 0-100%