Divergent Thinking
The foundation of Creativity
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Creativity, at its core, is seeing the world differently to others. The more creative you are, the more new possibilities you see. And those new possibilities are what fuel new art, new inventions, and new business ideas. If you want to be an innovator, you have to be creative. Which means, you have to be a divergent thinker.
Divergent thinking is a thought process or method used to generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions.
Four Principles for Becoming a More Divergent Thinker
Four Principles for Becoming a More Divergent Thinker
- Defer judgement
To defer judgement means to hold evaluation until a later time.
Deferring judgment requires the ability to suspend skepticism and to entertain the potential value of every alternative you might generate. This can be more difficult than it first seems, particularly in Western cultures, where we are not taught to suspend judgement. We are taught to be decisive, which people generally take to mean: decide immediately. While there are many cases where a quick decision is required, premature judgement is the enemy of creative thinking.
Note that phrases such as "have a bias to act" and "decide and move on", which are prevelant in the worlds of agile and in habits of the successful for example, are not necessarily suggesting quick or rash judgement. Instead they are proposing that a decision is better than indecision...deciding to defer judgement is taking action.
See also Just In Time and Making Better Decisions
- Go for quantity
To go for quantity is to be a fluent thinker, generating many ideas, options, and alternatives.
Quantity breeds quality. The more alternatives we generate, the more likely we are to find a promising option and, ultimately, produce a creative breakthrough. We can think of quantity in two ways: in particular and in general. In the particular, it is beneficial to seek a quantity of ideas when engaged in divergent thinking; that is, when addressing a particular problem. In general, a habit of divergent thinking leads to a quantity of ideas, which means we have more possibilities to play with in our lives.
See also The Double Diamond Model
- Make connections
To make connections is to combine things that had not been combined, or to draw inspiration from one thing when working on another.
Making connections is essential to the creative process. New thoughts or ideas are very often a combination of previously unrelated thoughts or ideas, which assume a new form as they intersect or are looked at from a different perspective. Most new consumer products are the combination of different parts that, when put together, create a new whole.
See also The Neuroscience of Creativity
- Seek novelty
To seek novelty is to pursue the goal of originality.
There is no creativity without originality. Thus, the guideline “Seek Novelty” is both a reminder and an encouragement to generate options that are new and unusual, options that go beyond the obvious and the familiar.
Creativity is not just originality, of course; creative solutions must also be useful, valuable, and appropriate. But that determination comes later. The divergent phase is the time to pursue novel responses.”
Based on Gerard Puccio’s book Creativity Rising
Creativity is high when psychological safety is high. Whilst it's a term that has been in favour in recent years, it was actually first coined by the psychologist Carl Rogers in the 1950s in the context of establishing the conditions conducive to creativity.
Why divergent thinkers beat geniuses in the real world - David Epstein
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