Divergent Thinking
What is Divergent Thinking?
Divergent thinking is a creative thought process that involves generating multiple solutions to a problem by exploring different perspectives and possibilities. It encourages brainstorming, free association, and out-of-the-box approaches to solve complex challenges. This type of thinking is essential for innovation, creativity, and problem-solving.
The Basic Idea
Imagine you are preparing for your first guitar performance at an open mic, with one hour to go before you take the stage. As you put your guitar into its case, you notice that one of the guitar strings is broken. The worst part? You don’t have a spare string, and the music store is already closed for the evening.
You’ve been looking forward to the open mic and don’t want to bail—it’s time to get creative! You take a piece of paper and write down all the possible solutions you can think of, no matter how silly they may seem:
- Use your father’s fishing line to replace the snapped string
- Ask one of the other musicians at open mic night for a spare string
- Modify your setlist to only include songs that don’t require that string
- Use a backing track so it’s less noticeable when you don’t hit the note
Now that you’ve come up with a list of potential solutions, you can assess which one is best. While asking another musician is probably your best bet, you’d have to wait until you arrive at the open mic. As a backup solution, you decide to bring a backing track with you. Coming up with multiple creative solutions to resolve a problem—known as divergent thinking—has allowed you to overcome the broken string challenge and still rock your performance at the open mic.1 Had you focused on only finding the single best solution—known as convergent thinking—you may have waited until you arrived at the open mic to tackle the issue, only to find out that no other musician has a spare string.2
There are four types of divergent thinking:3
- Fluency: The ability to generate a lot of ideas within a short time frame. This type of divergent thinking is often used in brainstorming sessions.
- Flexibility: The ability to generate ideas by tackling them from multiple perspectives. Getting a focus group of diverse participants together can be a method to engage in flexible divergent thinking.
- Originality: The ability to generate innovative and unique ideas, attempting to explore new approaches and ways of thinking.
- Elaboration: The ability to further develop existing ideas. After an initial concept or solution is thought of, other applications are brainstormed.
Divergent thinking is all about coming up with creative solutions to a problem without immediately judging or limiting them, allowing for more innovative and adaptable problem-solving.
It is my assertion that divergent thinking is infinite. The primary reasoning in support of my position can be explained when one considers the function of convergent thinking: to identify a single, well-defined solution (or a finite set of solutions) to a question, problem, or challenge. Therefore, if convergent thinking and divergent thinking work in opposition, then the latter must be infinite.
— Kevin Molesworth, innovation and change leadership consultant and author of Questioning Creativity: Modern Explorations in Creative Thinking4
About the Author
Emilie Rose Jones
Emilie currently works in Marketing & Communications for a non-profit organization based in Toronto, Ontario. She completed her Masters of English Literature at UBC in 2021, where she focused on Indigenous and Canadian Literature. Emilie has a passion for writing and behavioural psychology and is always looking for opportunities to make knowledge more accessible.
