Divergent thinking is a thought process or method used to generate creative ideas by exploring multiple possible solutions to a problem. Divergent thinking is an unstructured problem-solving method where participants are encouraged to develop many innovative ideas or solutions to a given problem. These ideas are generated and explored in a relatively short space of time.
Component
Description
Definition
Divergent thinking is a cognitive process that involves generating a wide range of creative ideas, solutions, or possibilities in response to an open-ended question or problem. It encourages thinking “outside the box” and exploring multiple perspectives.
Process
Divergent thinking typically involves the following steps: – Identifying the problem or question. – Generating as many ideas or solutions as possible without judgment. – Encouraging creativity and free-flowing thoughts. – Exploring various perspectives and unconventional approaches.
Metrics
Metrics related to divergent thinking may include “idea quantity,” “variety of solutions,” and “degree of novelty or uniqueness” to assess the creativity and effectiveness of generated ideas.
Benefits
– Enhanced creativity and innovation. – Increased problem-solving flexibility. – Improved adaptability to changing situations. – Fostering a culture of open-mindedness and creativity.
Drawbacks
– Lack of focus and organization. – Difficulty in evaluating and selecting the most suitable ideas. – Potential for impractical or unrealistic solutions. – Time-consuming process when compared to convergent thinking.
Applications
Divergent thinking is valuable in creative industries, brainstorming sessions, product development, design thinking, and any problem-solving context where fresh, creative solutions are essential.
Examples
– Brainstorming sessions to generate creative marketing campaign ideas. – Design thinking workshops to explore innovative product design concepts. – Collaborative problem-solving efforts to address complex, multifaceted challenges.
Experienced divergent thinkers tend to be curious, independent, and spontaneous.
They can readily generate creative ideas and have the ability to develop and improve them where necessary.
In business, divergent thinking can result in endless ideation and very few solutions if not used correctly.
In brainstorming and indeed most other ideation strategies, divergent thinking should be paired with convergent thinking.
This enables the organization to explore all possible options and then choose the one worth pursuing.
Ultimately, divergent thinking encourages decision-makers to break from the status quo by considering multiple perspectives.
For best results, the approach must be incorporated into project design with respect to time allocation, discussion formats, and specific interventions.
The four lenses of divergent thinking
To help teams think outside the box using divergent thinking, the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) developed a four-lens framework.
1 – Two-directional approach
This approach, which comprises core-forward and future-back thinking, helps break the incremental mindset prevalent in many companies today.
But this strategy in isolation is limiting and must be combined with the future-back approach.
That is, where is the company headed in the long term? Does the company have ambitions that aren’t related to financials? How will the business be fundamentally different in five years?
2 – Purpose
Purpose is the reason a company exists, shaping what it does and why it does it. When the purpose of an organization is aligned with its actions, growth and profitability result.
Purpose and divergent thinking are closely related.
Decision-makers who buy into a purpose are motivated to alter the behavior and consider novel ideas despite the risks of acting on them.
3 – Outside-in
The outside-in lens asks one fundamental question: “What will the ecosystem of the future look like in which companies must play and win?”
Too many companies look at trends to define their business models, defining the world and their industry based on what has occurred in the past.
Divergent thinking helps organizations consider the future impact or benefit that current trends may have.
4 – Disruption
Disruptive innovation from new players is a constant threat to incumbent market leaders, yet many of these firms through a combination of complacency and arrogance have no strategy to deal with it.
Indeed, innovation in market leaders tends to be based on large budgets, large teams, and long timeframes. It is not based on divergent thinking, which new and innovative companies employ to disrupt the market seemingly overnight.
Techniques that stimulate divergent thinking
Here are some of the techniques known to stimulate divergent thinking:
Eighteen years later, it was adapted by psychologist Bob Eberle in his book SCAMPER: Games for Imagination Development. The SCAMPER method was first described by advertising executive Alex Osborne in 1953. The SCAMPER method is a form of creative thinking or problem solving based on evaluating ideas or groups of ideas.
Journaling
This is a brilliant way to record spontaneous ideas that occur during the day.
Many individuals have brilliant flashes of insight while taking a shower or washing the dishes, but they are usually forgotten before they can be written down.
Journals help capture these seemingly random pieces of information where they can be synthesized later.
Freewriting
Where an individual focuses on one topic and writes continuously on it for a predetermined period of time.
The central premise of freewriting is to write whatever comes to mind without stopping to make edits or revisions.
Similar to journaling, the somewhat random thought process is first recorded and then reorganized later.
Impact mapping is a product development technique based on user design, mind mapping, and outcome-driven planning. Impact mapping is an agile technique intended to help teams connect individual product features that can impact the user behaviors while connecting to the key, guiding metrics for the business.
This process involves mapping brainstormed ideas visually to show the relationship between them.
The practitioner starts with a central theme and then links it with various topics and sub-topics using lines and circles.
The result is a map of each theme which can be used to creatively develop them further.
Drawbacks of Divergent Thinking
Lack of Focus and Direction:
Potential Overwhelm: Divergent thinking can sometimes lead to an overwhelming number of ideas, making it difficult to focus and choose a viable option.
Risk of Losing Sight of Goals: In the pursuit of creative ideas, there’s a risk of straying too far from the original goals or objectives.
Time and Resource Intensive:
Time-Consuming Process: Generating a wide range of ideas and exploring numerous possibilities can be time-consuming.
Resource Allocation: Dedicating resources to explore various ideas without immediate practical outcomes can be seen as inefficient, especially in time-sensitive environments.
Difficulty in Implementation:
Challenge in Converging Ideas: Transitioning from the broad ideation phase to a more focused, practical implementation can be challenging.
Risk of Infeasibility: Some ideas generated through divergent thinking may be highly creative but impractical or infeasible to implement.
Group Dynamics Challenges:
Potential for Conflict: The wide range of ideas and opinions can sometimes lead to conflicts or disagreements within a team.
Difficulty in Decision-Making: Reaching a consensus on which ideas to pursue can be difficult when multiple innovative options are presented.
When to Use Divergent Thinking
Suitable Scenarios:
Brainstorming Sessions: Ideal for initial brainstorming sessions where generating a wide range of ideas is beneficial.
Problem-Solving: Useful in problem-solving scenarios that require innovative and out-of-the-box solutions.
Strategic Application:
Innovation and Creativity: Can be strategically applied in fields that require high levels of creativity and innovation, such as product development, marketing, and design.
Adapting to Change: Useful in situations that require rapid adaptation and novel solutions, such as in rapidly changing market conditions.
How to Use Divergent Thinking
Implementing Divergent Thinking Techniques:
Encourage Openness: Create an environment where all ideas are welcomed and valued, regardless of how unconventional they might be.
Use Creative Techniques: Employ techniques like brainstorming, mind mapping, or SCAMPER to stimulate creative thinking.
Diverse Perspectives: Involve individuals from diverse backgrounds and disciplines to bring in a wide range of perspectives.
Time for Exploration: Allocate sufficient time for free exploration of ideas without immediate judgment or critique.
Best Practices:
Balance with Convergent Thinking: Balance divergent thinking with convergent thinking to ensure that ideas generated are eventually narrowed down to feasible solutions.
Documentation of Ideas: Keep a record of all ideas generated, as they might be useful at a later stage or for different projects.
Embrace Experimentation: Encourage a culture of experimentation and acceptance of failure as part of the creative process.
What to Expect from Implementing Divergent Thinking
Enhanced Creativity and Innovation:
Increased Creative Output: Expect a significant boost in creative ideas and innovative solutions.
Broader Perspective: Divergent thinking helps in exploring problems and opportunities from multiple angles, leading to a more comprehensive understanding.
Organizational Impact:
Fosters a Creative Culture: Promotes a culture of creativity and open-mindedness within the team or organization.
Improves Problem-Solving Skills: Enhances the team’s ability to think critically and solve complex problems creatively.
Potential Challenges:
Managing the Creative Process: Balancing the freedom of creative exploration with practical constraints and objectives can be challenging.
Integrating Ideas into Practical Strategies: Transitioning from ideation to actionable strategies requires careful planning and prioritization.
Key takeaways
Divergent thinking is a thought process or method used to generate creative ideas by exploring multiple possible solutions to a problem. Ultimately, it encourages decision-makers to break from the status quo by considering multiple perspectives.
The four lenses of divergent thinking in business are a two-directional approach, organizational purpose, forward-thinking, and disruption.
Divergent thinking can be stimulated by various techniques, including the SCAMPER and Business Model Canvas brainstorming approaches. For individuals, journaling and freewriting are effective.
Key highlights about divergent thinking:
Definition and Purpose: Divergent thinking is a creative thought process that generates multiple innovative solutions to a problem. It encourages exploration of various possibilities in a short time span.
Characteristics of Divergent Thinkers: Skilled divergent thinkers are curious, independent, and spontaneous. They generate and refine creative ideas effectively.
Balancing Divergent and Convergent Thinking: While divergent thinking is crucial for ideation, it should be complemented by convergent thinking for evaluating and selecting the best ideas to pursue.
Four Lenses of Divergent Thinking:
Two-Directional Approach: Combining core-forward and future-back thinking to break away from incremental mindsets.
Convergent thinking occurs when the solution to a problem can be found by applying established rules and logical reasoning. Whereas divergent thinking is an unstructured problem-solving method where participants are encouraged to develop many innovative ideas or solutions to a given problem. Where convergent thinking might work for larger, mature organizations where divergent thinking is more suited for startups and innovative companies.
The concept of cognitive biases was introduced and popularized by the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in 1972. Biases are seen as systematic errors and flaws that make humans deviate from the standards of rationality, thus making us inept at making good decisions under uncertainty.
Second-order thinking is a means of assessing the implications of our decisions by considering future consequences. Second-order thinking is a mental model that considers all future possibilities. It encourages individuals to think outside of the box so that they can prepare for every and eventuality. It also discourages the tendency for individuals to default to the most obvious choice.
Lateral thinking is a business strategy that involves approaching a problem from a different direction. The strategy attempts to remove traditionally formulaic and routine approaches to problem-solving by advocating creative thinking, therefore finding unconventional ways to solve a known problem. This sort of non-linear approach to problem-solving, can at times, create a big impact.
Bounded rationality is a concept attributed to Herbert Simon, an economist and political scientist interested in decision-making and how we make decisions in the real world. In fact, he believed that rather than optimizing (which was the mainstream view in the past decades) humans follow what he called satisficing.
The Dunning-Kruger effect describes a cognitive bias where people with low ability in a task overestimate their ability to perform that task well. Consumers or businesses that do not possess the requisite knowledge make bad decisions. What’s more, knowledge gaps prevent the person or business from seeing their mistakes.
Occam’s Razor states that one should not increase (beyond reason) the number of entities required to explain anything. All things being equal, the simplest solution is often the best one. The principle is attributed to 14th-century English theologian William of Ockham.
The Lindy Effect is a theory about the ageing of non-perishable things, like technology or ideas. Popularized by author Nicholas Nassim Taleb, the Lindy Effect states that non-perishable things like technology age – linearly – in reverse. Therefore, the older an idea or a technology, the same will be its life expectancy.
Antifragility was first coined as a term by author, and options trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Antifragility is a characteristic of systems that thrive as a result of stressors, volatility, and randomness. Therefore, Antifragile is the opposite of fragile. Where a fragile thing breaks up to volatility; a robust thing resists volatility. An antifragile thing gets stronger from volatility (provided the level of stressors and randomness doesn’t pass a certain threshold).
Systems thinking is a holistic means of investigating the factors and interactions that could contribute to a potential outcome. It is about thinking non-linearly, and understanding the second-order consequences of actions and input into the system.
Vertical thinking, on the other hand, is a problem-solving approach that favors a selective, analytical, structured, and sequential mindset. The focus of vertical thinking is to arrive at a reasoned, defined solution.
Maslow’s Hammer, otherwise known as the law of the instrument or the Einstellung effect, is a cognitive bias causing an over-reliance on a familiar tool. This can be expressed as the tendency to overuse a known tool (perhaps a hammer) to solve issues that might require a different tool. This problem is persistent in the business world where perhaps known tools or frameworks might be used in the wrong context (like business plans used as planning tools instead of only investors’ pitches).
The Peter Principle was first described by Canadian sociologist Lawrence J. Peter in his 1969 book The Peter Principle. The Peter Principle states that people are continually promoted within an organization until they reach their level of incompetence.
The straw man fallacy describes an argument that misrepresents an opponent’s stance to make rebuttal more convenient. The straw man fallacy is a type of informal logical fallacy, defined as a flaw in the structure of an argument that renders it invalid.
The Streisand Effect is a paradoxical phenomenon where the act of suppressing information to reduce visibility causes it to become more visible. In 2003, Streisand attempted to suppress aerial photographs of her Californian home by suing photographer Kenneth Adelman for an invasion of privacy. Adelman, who Streisand assumed was paparazzi, was instead taking photographs to document and study coastal erosion. In her quest for more privacy, Streisand’s efforts had the opposite effect.
As highlighted by German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer in the paper “Heuristic Decision Making,” the term heuristic is of Greek origin, meaning “serving to find out or discover.” More precisely, a heuristic is a fast and accurate way to make decisions in the real world, which is driven by uncertainty.
The recognition heuristic is a psychological model of judgment and decision making. It is part of a suite of simple and economical heuristics proposed by psychologists Daniel Goldstein and Gerd Gigerenzer. The recognition heuristic argues that inferences are made about an object based on whether it is recognized or not.
The representativeness heuristic was first described by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. The representativeness heuristic judges the probability of an event according to the degree to which that event resembles a broader class. When queried, most will choose the first option because the description of John matches the stereotype we may hold for an archaeologist.
The take-the-best heuristic is a decision-making shortcut that helps an individual choose between several alternatives. The take-the-best (TTB) heuristic decides between two or more alternatives based on a single good attribute, otherwise known as a cue. In the process, less desirable attributes are ignored.
The bundling bias is a cognitive bias in e-commerce where a consumer tends not to use all of the products bought as a group, or bundle. Bundling occurs when individual products or services are sold together as a bundle. Common examples are tickets and experiences. The bundling bias dictates that consumers are less likely to use each item in the bundle. This means that the value of the bundle and indeed the value of each item in the bundle is decreased.
The Barnum Effect is a cognitive bias where individuals believe that generic information – which applies to most people – is specifically tailored for themselves.
First-principles thinking – sometimes called reasoning from first principles – is used to reverse-engineer complex problems and encourage creativity. It involves breaking down problems into basic elements and reassembling them from the ground up. Elon Musk is among the strongest proponents of this way of thinking.
The ladder of inference is a conscious or subconscious thinking process where an individual moves from a fact to a decision or action. The ladder of inference was created by academic Chris Argyris to illustrate how people form and then use mental models to make decisions.
Goodhart’s Law is named after British monetary policy theorist and economist Charles Goodhart. Speaking at a conference in Sydney in 1975, Goodhart said that “any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.” Goodhart’s Law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
The Six Thinking Hats model was created by psychologist Edward de Bono in 1986, who noted that personality type was a key driver of how people approached problem-solving. For example, optimists view situations differently from pessimists. Analytical individuals may generate ideas that a more emotional person would not, and vice versa.
The Mandela effect is a phenomenon where a large group of people remembers an event differently from how it occurred. The Mandela effect was first described in relation to Fiona Broome, who believed that former South African President Nelson Mandela died in prison during the 1980s. While Mandela was released from prison in 1990 and died 23 years later, Broome remembered news coverage of his death in prison and even a speech from his widow. Of course, neither event occurred in reality. But Broome was later to discover that she was not the only one with the same recollection of events.
The bandwagon effect tells us that the more a belief or idea has been adopted by more people within a group, the more the individual adoption of that idea might increase within the same group. This is the psychological effect that leads to herd mentality. What in marketing can be associated with social proof.
Moore’s law states that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles approximately every two years. This observation was made by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965 and it become a guiding principle for the semiconductor industry and has had far-reaching implications for technology as a whole.
Disruptive innovation as a term was first described by Clayton M. Christensen, an American academic and business consultant whom The Economist called “the most influential management thinker of his time.” Disruptive innovation describes the process by which a product or service takes hold at the bottom of a market and eventually displaces established competitors, products, firms, or alliances.
Value migration was first described by author Adrian Slywotzky in his 1996 book Value Migration – How to Think Several Moves Ahead of the Competition. Value migration is the transferal of value-creating forces from outdated business models to something better able to satisfy consumer demands.
The bye-now effect describes the tendency for consumers to think of the word “buy” when they read the word “bye”. In a study that tracked diners at a name-your-own-price restaurant, each diner was asked to read one of two phrases before ordering their meal. The first phrase, “so long”, resulted in diners paying an average of $32 per meal. But when diners recited the phrase “bye bye” before ordering, the average price per meal rose to $45.
Groupthink occurs when well-intentioned individuals make non-optimal or irrational decisions based on a belief that dissent is impossible or on a motivation to conform. Groupthink occurs when members of a group reach a consensus without critical reasoning or evaluation of the alternatives and their consequences.
A stereotype is a fixed and over-generalized belief about a particular group or class of people. These beliefs are based on the false assumption that certain characteristics are common to every individual residing in that group. Many stereotypes have a long and sometimes controversial history and are a direct consequence of various political, social, or economic events. Stereotyping is the process of making assumptions about a person or group of people based on various attributes, including gender, race, religion, or physical traits.
Murphy’s Law states that if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong. Murphy’s Law was named after aerospace engineer Edward A. Murphy. During his time working at Edwards Air Force Base in 1949, Murphy cursed a technician who had improperly wired an electrical component and said, “If there is any way to do it wrong, he’ll find it.”
The law of unintended consequences was first mentioned by British philosopher John Locke when writing to parliament about the unintended effects of interest rate rises. However, it was popularized in 1936 by American sociologist Robert K. Merton who looked at unexpected, unanticipated, and unintended consequences and their impact on society.
Fundamental attribution error is a bias people display when judging the behavior of others. The tendency is to over-emphasize personal characteristics and under-emphasize environmental and situational factors.
Outcome bias describes a tendency to evaluate a decision based on its outcome and not on the process by which the decision was reached. In other words, the quality of a decision is only determined once the outcome is known. Outcome bias occurs when a decision is based on the outcome of previous events without regard for how those events developed.
Hindsight bias is the tendency for people to perceive past events as more predictable than they actually were. The result of a presidential election, for example, seems more obvious when the winner is announced. The same can also be said for the avid sports fan who predicted the correct outcome of a match regardless of whether their team won or lost. Hindsight bias, therefore, is the tendency for an individual to convince themselves that they accurately predicted an event before it happened.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
