Creative Divergence and ConvergenceHelp

As we discussed in Week 1, there are loads of myths and misconceptions about creativity out there, and some of those myths involve these two terms: divergence (or divergent thinking) and convergence (or convergent thinking). So, were going to do some more myth-busting today (one of my favorite activities!) to set the record straight on these important concepts by viewing them through the lens of Creative Diversity. We think that this new perspective will help you appreciate ideas yours, and those of others in a different way, and hopefully encourage more of them too!

Introduction: Some Definitions

The terms divergent thinking and convergent thinking were originally coined by a psychologist named J. P. Guilford, who was the President of the American Psychological Association and a world-famous expert on creativity. He defined divergence and convergence as two stages of a process that everyone uses: the thinking process.

Guilford defined the terms this way:

Divergent thinking = generating multiple ideas, solutions, or alternatives. Convergent thinking = evaluating and selecting from among those alternatives.

Notice what Guilford didnt say: He didnt say that divergent thinking requires out -of-the-box or radical ideas. And he also didnt say that convergent thinking is narrow or uncreative. Divergent thinking simply means that you come up with more than one idea or option for something, and convergent thinking means that you reduce your collection of ideas to a smaller number of possibilities.

As stages of a process which is a very general way of describing how something is done, Guilford said that divergent thinking and convergent thinking can both be carried out in many different ways in other words, at different creative levels and using different creative styles. There isnt a particular level or style attached to each one and everyone does both.

What about Those Myths?

So, heres the problem. Since Guilfords time, other people have taken divergent thinking and convergent thinking out of their original context and presented them as styles of thinking and

then proposed that some people only use one of them, while other people only use the other! It sounds familiar, doesnt it? Putting people into two piles agai n piles that dont exist! This is the first myth we want to bust.

Guilford didnt put people into piles and neither will we. After all, how can a person only generate alternatives never choosing between them and ever get anything done? You would spend all day thinking of different ways to get to work, but never go anywhere! And how could someone spend all their time selecting a solution without generating options to choose from? Thats like picking your clothes out of an empty closet!

Other people perpetuate another myth that a persons thinking is only divergent if they generate solutions that are radical or breakthrough. Sound familiar again? Youre right its related to the myth that people are only creative if they offer ideas of a radical kind. These two myths often get mixed up together giving us the compound myth that creative people are divergent thinkers, while uncreative people are convergent thinkers. And thats just nonsense!

Busting the Myths with Creative Diversity

Fortunately, we can use two more principles of Creative Diversity to sort this out. Lets begin by going back to Guilfords original meaning of the terms divergent and convergent, which leads us to

Creative Diversity Principle #5: Everyone both diverges and converges.

Everyone diverges and converges every day in fact, it happens repeatedly throughout your day. You generate different solutions to a challenge at work, you come up with multiple options for your childs lunchbox, and you think about dif ferent driving or walking routes to get home or to the store. From those possibilities, you reduce your options to one or a few and move forward with that selection. If you didnt diverge and converge each day, you would accomplish nothing!

Creative Diversity Principle #6: We each diverge and converge in accordance with our respective creative levels and styles.

Just like creativity in general, our individual creative levels and styles impact the ways in which we diverge and converge in our thinking. In other words, we dont all diverge and converge in the same way! Left to our own preferences and abilities, our divergent and convergent thinking will reflect our individual differences. Lets think about what those differences look like in action:

Creative Level and Divergence/Convergence:

One easy way to think about creative level is to consider how much information we can each manage at one time and how quickly we pick up and recall that information. People with a higher creative level can usually manage a larger amount of information at once, and that information can be more complex or advanced. They are also able to absorb and recall it faster. For example, a child with a high level in mathematics may learn and remember her multiplication tables very quickly. A young college student with a moderate level in languages may pick up two languages readily, but struggle with learning a third. A professional salesman with a low level may be able to remember the names of 10 clients, but not 100. And so on.

So then, what does it look like to diverge at different levels?

Let me illustrate this with an example. Lets say that we want to think divergently as we try to invent a new candy bar. We want to generate multiple options for what that candy bar might be its flavor, its ingredients, its appearance, its packaging, and so on. The higher my creative level, the more possible candy bar solutions I can devise and manipulate at one time and the more quickly I can do so as well. My imagined candy bars are more likely to be more complex and advanced than the candy bars of someone with a lower level than my own. A higher level will also allow me to recall what Ive learned about candy bars more easily and more accurately than someone with a lower level. Of course, if I dont know anything about candy bars, then my high capacity for managing ideas will be limited by this lack of knowledge, but I may still be able to generate ideas based on what I know about other related things say, other sweet snacks like cakes or cookies. Remember that we measure creative level in different ways, including your potential capacity to know and learn, as well as what youve learned already (called your manifest level).

Notice that I havent said anything about the value or the quality of my ideas. Divergent thinking is about generating options, whatever those options may be. So, no matter what kind of ideas you generate no matter how small or large, simple or complex, useful or outrageous, evolutionary or revolutionary in nature you are engaged in divergent thinking.

Now, what does it look like to converge at different levels?

Lets stick with our candy bar example. Convergent thinking is about selecting a smaller number of options based on some criteria, so you can move forward with them. You may even choose just one option. A person with a higher level (i.e., greater intelligence, knowledge, or skill) may use more advanced criteria to choose the ingredients for their candy bar, or they might make the choice of

manufacturing methods with greater precision relative to any constraints on the problem. A person with a lower level may choose simpler alternatives or do a less thorough job of justifying their choices or do a poorer job of meeting any necessary constraints. In the end, convergent thinking is about reducing the number of alternatives, but it doesnt stipulate how that reduction comes about.

Creative Style and Divergence/Convergence:

Now lets talk a bit about creative style and how it impacts our divergen t and convergent thinking. As youll remember, there are many ways to measure creative style. In this lesson, well focus on the Adaption-Innovation creative style continuum as one example. According to Michael Kirton, a distinguished British psychologist, a persons creative style falls somewhere along a continuum between strongly adaptive and strongly innovative. (Visit this page from Week 1 for a diagram: https://class.coursera.org/cic-001/wiki/view?page=ex_creativestyle). Most people fall somewhere in the middle, since the distribution of creative style is a Bell curve a normal distribution. Rather than putting people into piles, we use the full spectrum of style by saying that someone is more/less adaptive or more/less innovative than another person. This is more accurate than just saying that someone is an adaptor or an innovator. And remember a person who is more adaptive is just as creative (in general) as a person who is more innovative! Creative style is about HOW you are creative, not WHETHER you are creative.

Whats the impact of creative style on divergent thinking?

People who are more adaptive prefer more structure in their thinking, and they tend to make use of structure to find solutions. When they are given a problem to solve, they are more likely to start with solutions that are known to solve it and work to improve and refine them before they move on to solution paths that are less well known. So, when a more adaptive person uses divergent thinking, they are more systematic about it than their more innovative colleagues. They cover the space of ideas in a more careful and meticulous fashion, focusing more on the details and on continuity between the ideas they generate and the task or problem those ideas are meant to solve.

Thomas Edison is a great example of a more adaptive thinker who did a lot of divergent thinking as part of his inventions. You probably know the story of his search for the best filament for the incandescent light bulb he searched through and tried out 1000s of possibilities! He did this in a careful and systematic way (called a drag hunt), sear ching the literature for ideas and trying them out one by one. If the space of possible solutions were a map, you would find Edison marking it out with a big grid and checking of the spaces one by one as he explored them!

In contrast, people who are more innovative prefer less structure in their thinking, and they tend to shed structure in order to find solutions. When they are given a problem to solve, they are more

likely to reject solutions that are known to solve it and try to find different paths tha t havent been explored yet. So, when a more innovative person uses divergent thinking, they are less systematic and more tangential about it than their more adaptive colleagues. They cover the space of ideas in more of a shot-gun fashion, seeming to jum p from place to place, looking for clusters and connections, and focusing less on the details of the problem.

Leonardo da Vinci is a great example of a more innovative thinker who did a lot of divergent thinking to support his inventing. Looking at the collection of inventions da Vinci made and imagined helicopters, boats, crossbows, and more you can see that his divergent thinking was much more tangential and might appear haphazard. But for da Vinci, all those tangential connections made sense it was a reflection of how his more innovative brain worked. If da Vinci were exploring the same idea space with Edison, they might drive each other crazy!

Now, what about the impact of creative style on convergent thinking?

When people of different creative styles think convergently, their different preferences for structure are evident. A more innovative person, for example, is more likely to select ideas based on how unusual they are compared to what is already known, and he or she may be less concerned whether others agree with the selection. A more adaptive person, on the other hand, is more likely to rely on careful reasoning to choose those ideas that seem most likely to succeed based on what is currently available. Neither one of these general approaches is better or worse than the other they are just different each with its own advantages and disadvantages.

In closing this piece on creative style, remember that no place on the spectrum is better than any other. Every style of thinking is needed for our species to survive. These patterns are a result of a thinking preference something that is hard-wired into your brain when you are born and which doesnt change throughout your life. But you can learn skills that help you think in different ways when you need to, if youre willing to put in the extra effort to do so. Thats part of what were learning in this course!

Note: In Week 1 of this course, we offered a Creative Style Estimation Exercise in which you can get a general estimate of your creative style through a set of 10 simple questions. If you missed that exercise, you can go back and complete it now. The link to the questions (loaded in Qualtrics) is in our Course email for Week 1; well repeat it again in Week 2.

Closing

As we wrap up our discussion of divergent and convergent thinking, its important to open your mind to the possibilities of someone thinking differently than you do and how valuable that can be. Sometimes we see a person who is more innovative than we are jumping from one idea to another, or we see a person who is more adaptive than we are focusing on the details and we think: How silly! How can he or she get anything done that way? Or we see someone who is at a different creative level either greater or less than our own and we think: Those ideas arent important or they dont make sense. In the context of the right problem, that persons thinking may be just what is needed.

Can you shift your thinking to welcome their input instead of rejecting it? Until next time, thanks for being here with us!

Some Questions to Think About: Think about these questions and write down your answers in your Idea Journal or in a discussion forum or discuss them with a friend or colleague: In learning about divergent and convergent thinking, did you have to unlearn anything first? Think about your own way of working with ideas: do you tend to diverge in a more adaptive (more structured) way or a more innovative (less structured) way? What about converging? What is your creative level and how does that impact the way you diverge and converge? When do you find your preferred way of thinking (both level and style) to be an advantage for you? When is it a disadvantage? How and why?