Cognitive science experiments suggest that writing out descriptions of the similarities between two possible base or source cases enhances people's abilities to induce schemas that can be used in a new circumstance. Holyoak, The Pragmatics of Analogical Transfer, 19 Psychol. Learning & Motivation 59, 78 (1987); Richard Catrambone & Keith J. Holyoak, Overcoming Contextual Limitations on Problem Solving Transfer, 15 J. Experimental Psychol.: Learning, Memory & Cognition 1147, 1149 (1989). Role plays also help--research suggests that people reasoning from within a circumstance tend to draw more connections with schemas. Blasi, supra, at 133.
 
Techniques from studies of rhetoric could also help people develop abilities to analogize. Comparisons using the contrasts of superiority/inferiority, more/less, cause/effect, antecedents/consequence, possible/impossible could be useful in generating analogies. See Edward P.J. Corbett, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student 102-118 (1990). In addition to these types of comparisons, try identifying analogous relations between parts and wholes, group and members, contrasts of incommensurability, relationships in space or through time, see Ch. Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation 234-247, 321-327, 390-392 (1969)(trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver). Categories from instrumental reason can also help generate analogies: consider relations bewteen purpose or function and form or method, costs and benefits, and success and failure.