Mind Performance Hacks

Hack #20. Force Your Connections

Use a simple process to generate many complex ideas quickly from a limited pool of simple ideas.

The process of morphological forced connections is fairly old; the picture books for children that allow you to combine the head of a giraffe with the body of a hippo and the tail of a fish are one example. The process was formalized by Fritz Zwicky at Caltech in the 1960s¹ and was popularized in 1972 by Don Koberg and Jim Bagnall in their book The Universal Traveler.²

Most other books that discuss the technique seem to derive their discussion of it from The Universal Traveler and even use the same example: creating a new design for a ballpoint pen. We'll take a somewhat different approach.

In Action

The basic process for making forced connections, as outlined by Koberg and Bagnall, is simple and sound:

1. List possible features of the object you are trying to create, one feature per column. For example, the features might include color, size, and shape.

2. In the column under each feature variable, list as many values for that variable as you can. For example, under color you might list all the colors of the rainbow, as well as black, white, gold, and silver.

3. Finally, randomly combine the values in your table many times, using one value from each column. To continue our example, you would use one color, one size, and one shape each time.

Tip

Technically, steps 1 and 2 are morphological analysis, and step 3 is the morphological forced connections stage.

The result will ...