The First-Principles Approach to Unique Ideas

Why are the names of problem-solving techniques and frameworks more complicated than the problems they try to solve?

Well, Morphological Analysis might just take the cake for the most complicated name. But don't let the name scare you away.

This powerful technique involves deconstructing complex problems into their parts and then combining them in new and innovative ways.

In this post, we'll explore the benefits of Morphological Analysis and how it can help you unlock your creativity and find solutions to even the most challenging problems.

Step 1: Deconstruction

There are often many assumptions and biases about a given subject that interfere with our ability to make new connections with a familiar topic.

One core benefit of this technique is that it encourages people to step outside of these assumptions. By forcing you to deconstruct complex ideas into their base parts and think about them in a new way. This is critical to tease out as many assumptions and biases that you have about the topic as a whole.

Let’s go through an example to kick things off.

Imagine you're trying to come up with a new type of restaurant experience. You might deconstruct the typical restaurant experience in the following way.

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Step 2: Forced Association

Now comes the fun.

Once everything has been deconstructed, the goal is to put the pieces back together in as many interesting ways as you can think of.

Let’s continue our example. Now that we have some of the elements of a typical restaurant experience, let’s see how many unique ideas we can come up with.

Atmosphere: mellow and dimly lit, with blues music playing. The furniture looks like it is from the ’60s. Food: Organic salads only from vegetables grown on the rooftop of the building. Everything is served in wooden bowls. Service: The staff is dressed up in dress shirts and ties and has excellent training on the perfect pairings between the vegetables on drinks

Atmosphere: No lights at all. Only natural light from the many windows. The place closes once the sun goes down. Only nature sounds are playing. Food: There are stations with all sorts of different delicacies from every type of jungle in the world. You make a reservation at a station instead of a table. Service: The staff is dressed like wilderness explorers.

I’m not sure anyone would want to go to either of those restaurants but you can start to see how trying to put the pieces back together in interesting ways, leads you to ideas that wouldn’t have been possible if I asked you to simply come up with a new idea for a restaurant.

Dynamic Enough To Be Used Alone or In A Group Setting

Morphological Analysis is a powerful tool for generating unique ideas and approaching problems from a fresh perspective. And since it provides a great structure for what is usually a messy process, it can be a great format for a workshop or idea generation session.

You could spend the first 50% of the meeting breaking down the pieces of the varying components of whatever problem you're trying to solve, then spend the remaining 50% letting everyone make all sorts of new connections. Ideally, this would be done in groups so everyone can present their findings to the larger group so all sorts of connections can be independently made.

Whether alone or in a group, this is one of the most simple yet powerful methods I know of to get to innovative solutions from a first-principles perspective.