You come up with creative solutions more than you might think.
Perhaps you ran out of time on a task and had to come up with a way to get things done faster. Maybe a project at work shifted around and you had to make changes on the fly. Or when your car broke down right before a road trip, and you opted for an adventure via train instead.
Not every problem has an obvious solution, and when an issue requires creative problem-solving, you have to come up with innovative plan Bs and Cs. When you think outside of the box and analyze different solutions, you’re practicing divergent thinking.
When you harness your ability to think divergently while confronting obstacles in your personal life or the workplace, you generate creative solutions and learn from the outcome. If you’re looking to increase innovation and flex your problem-solving skills, honing this ability can help.
What is divergent thinking?
Divergent thinking, sometimes called lateral thinking, is the process of generating multiple solutions for a problem before deciding on the best one. This type of thought is generally non-linear and free-flowing, meaning that there’s no defined route for arriving at a decision. The divergent brain doesn’t seek one “correct” answer but an innovative, unexpected solution.
Here are some characteristics of people with divergent minds:
Keep in mind that divergent thinking is a skill that you can build, not an innate personality trait. It might take practice to learn how to seek unique solutions if it doesn’t come naturally to you, but that doesn’t make it impossible to learn.
Divergent versus convergent thinking
Whereas divergent thinking aims to generate multiple innovative solutions, its opposite, convergent thinking, focuses on landing on one “right” idea. Its structured decision-making process is often easier to follow, but it could miss out on exciting solutions.
Convergent thinking’s direct, to-the-point style is:
- Non-ambiguous
- Quick
- Linear
- Efficient
- Logical
- Accurate
- Good for problems that have tried-and-tested solutions
Divergent thinking’s out-of-the-box, generative style is:
- Creative
- Exploratory
- Excellent for teams with different points of view
- Often more time-intensive
- Sometimes more impulsive
The pros and cons of divergent thinking
You might associate terms like “creative” and “out-of-the-box” with trailblazing thinking that leads to advances and inventions. And while divergent thinking often does generate one-of-a-kind solutions and encourage collaboration, this creative problem-solving route might unnecessarily complicate some tasks.
Here’s more on the pros and cons of divergent thinking:
Pros
Divergent thinking thrives in situations where the best solution is the most innovative one. That’s because this thought style:
Takes the time necessary to generate a new idea
Divergent thinkers often try multiple solutions to a problem, even if there’s already a clear, established solution to an issue that the person or team could repeat. This takes time, but when teams challenge themselves to push past obvious answers, they innovate instead of taking the quickest — but not necessarily best — route.
Helps teams bond
Everyone on your team thinks differently and has exciting ideas to offer, even if they aren’t solutions that naturally make sense to you. Take advantage of this cognitive diversity to find new solutions and promote team bonding at the same time.
Giving all teammates a chance to share and defend their answers empowers and includes them. Through the process, you open your mind to a range of thinking and communication styles and invite team members to do the same.
Promotes flexibility
Successful ways of working tend to stagnate, but what functioned well for a series of marketing campaigns might not continue to grab your audience’s attention as time goes on. Instead of sticking to past solutions, use a divergent brainstorming process and push your team to try new possibilities.
When you practice divergent thinking, you’re also more likely to adapt. If you’re already in the habit of generating innovative solutions, your instinct will be to react to roadblocks flexibly instead of following a route just because it’s what you planned. And according to an article in the Clinical Psychology Review, cognitive flexibility goes hand in hand with other strengths like identity development and emotional regulation.
Creates new opportunities
As you and your team think of new ideas in the divergent brainstorming process, you might identify opportunities adjacent to the current project. Even if they aren’t relevant in the moment, they could be worth pursuing in the future.
While coming up with ideas for a marketing campaign, the group may discover the opportunity for a new product that would resonate with the target audience. The team can’t develop that product now because the company has other priorities, but it could be an excellent value-add down the road.
Cons
Although divergent processes are great ways to expand your thinking, they could take time and lack organization. If you have to make a decision quickly and logically, this method might hold you back. Here’s why:
Takes time
If you don’t have much time to make a decision, chances are you can’t adequately weigh various options. This may cause you to preemptively choose a course of action without thinking it fully through. And if you use up your decision-making time brainstorming, you may lose precious planning time, which could lead to an under-researched approach to a project.
Encourages analysis paralysis
Brainstorming is kind of like dreaming. Imagining long-term outcomes is exciting and fun, and dreaming big could give you ideas you wouldn’t have otherwise considered. But routine decisions don’t require this kind of lofty creative thinking.
If you approach every decision from a divergent angle, you may find yourself constantly stuck at a crossroads or paralyzed by options. It could overcomplicate even minor choices, like the best way to organize a simple spreadsheet.
Loses focus
Imagine a scenario in which your team is trying to create a winning idea for an email campaign, and during your brainstorming session, you drift to generating plans for social media. The ideas for your social media strategy may be excellent, but they aren’t helping your team make the decision at hand.
While it might be a good thing to come up with new directions, it distracts from your current tasks. You can avoid this flaw of the divergent thought process by keeping strict meeting agendas and saving potential ideas for future discussion.
Scatters action steps
A thought process that’s too broad can lead to action items that are unrealistic or don’t make sense. If your team comes up with divergent ideas for each step of the work, the route to your project goals will look like a series of roads that branch off in different directions rather than a straight line. Be sure to identify a clear aim and causal steps to reaching it.
4 divergent thinking examples
Divergent thinking seems simple: you have a problem, generate multiple solutions, and land on the best route forward. But brainstorming big ideas takes more than just those three steps, and if you aren’t familiar with divergent processes, it might be hard to visualize.
Here are four examples of divergent thinking for large projects:
1. Designing a marketing campaign
Your team must design a series of email marketing campaigns to expand your more traditional clothing brand to a progressive, hip audience. The group gathers for a brainstorming session where no ideas are off-limits.
One person suggests an email that shows how to style pieces to recreate iconic looks from movies. Another recommends talking up the company’s sustainability initiatives, which would resonate with the conscientious target audience. By thinking of varying ideas that lean toward the same goal, your team is working divergently.
2. Creating an application feature
Your development team needs to create a banking app feature that helps users control their spending. The most straightforward solution might be making a screen that graphs expenditures and savings, which would work, but it doesn’t set you apart from competitors.
In a divergent brainstorming session, one person might suggest motivational messages that pop up on the user’s phone when they’ve done an excellent job saving that week. Another might recommend creating a feature that lets users set a spending limit and alerts them when they get close.
The team may opt for a hybrid of both solutions, keeping users on track with both spending and saving. This outcome is more compelling and innovative than the straightforward idea the team came up with at first.
3. Planning an event
You’ve been to dozens of team bonding events with the same type of food, decor, and music. Now it’s time for you to plan an outing for your team, and you want to do something different.
You survey the group and encourage everyone to respond as creatively as possible. As the results pour in, you gather creative ideas for off-sites, like participating in a fun run as a relay team or having a museum night. These aren’t events you’d have thought of, but bringing in ideas from different minds helps you expand your repertoire.
4. Creating a product
Your design team wants to create a sustainable furniture line. You meet to generate ideas, and the first ones to surface involve upcycling vintage pieces. But before establishing a plan to find and refurbish used items, a team member suggests that this idea could be unwieldy, time-consuming, and result in an unpredictable product line.
To overcome this roadblock, you have to think divergently. Someone else suggests sourcing recycled materials for manufacturing, like plastic or wood scraps to repurpose. And another offers using materials from the company’s unsold stock. In the process, the team excitedly envisions the marketing angle for these new products, a title for the furniture line, and campaign ideas.
3 tips for implementing divergent thinking
If you’re facing a tricky problem and want to create an innovative solution, you may want to try divergent thinking. But if you classically think convergently or aren’t sure how to begin with divergent models, these three tips can help:
1. Learn how to brainstorm effectively
Brainstorming — alone or in a team — is an excellent way to get the divergent juices flowing. When a non-urgent problem comes up, let yourself experiment to practice thinking of new ideas. Generate concepts you may throw out later. All thoughts are valid in this process.
If you’re doing this with a team, hold a meeting and flush out ideas on a whiteboard, or have everyone write out any solution that comes to mind. You could even create a shared digital document where people can leave ideas as they arise. Seeing everything in one place can help you find solutions.
2. Write ideas down
Journaling is an excellent way to foster divergent thinking, even when you don’t immediately have an issue to solve. Try a free-writing exercise in which you pen whatever comes to mind — from notes on your day to ideas for future work initiatives. Then, when a problem arises, you can use your journaling skills to generate potential solutions.
Your journal is a private place where anything goes, and working this way to create ideas can take the pressure off. Instead of tossing out solutions that aren’t viable or feeling like you need to land on a “perfect” solution, you can approach problem-solving with less fear, which could lead to out-of-the-box thinking.
3. Practice mind-mapping
According to a 2002 study, mind mapping can increase information retention by 10–15%, which is helpful when you’re trying to juggle many ideas at once. A mind map is a diagram in which you can arrange ideas around a central concept. For example, you could place “new marketing campaign” at the core and group ideas on different branches around it. Email ideas could go on one branch, social media on another, and so on.
Mind maps are what you make them. They support divergent thinking because they drive brainstorming in an organized structure, and it’s customizable to your needs. If your brain prefers to divide up a marketing mind map by outreach platform, that works. If visualizing each branch as a different stage of the marketing process is more functional for you, that’s valid, too. The goal is to write down ideas without letting any slip.
There’s a divergent thinker in everyone
No matter how straightforward your line of thinking may be, you can come up with innovative ideas. You just have to tap into your divergent thinking skills.
The next time a problem arises and you have time to generate unique solutions, put the ideas you’d commonly choose to the side and start brainstorming, free-writing, or talking through your potential plans with others. You won’t always need to make decisions this way, but it’s good practice when you need to innovate.
-1.png)
