Use Divergent Thinking For More Productive Brainstorming

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Do you wish there was a better way to brainstorm that would help you and your team come up with more, new innovative ideas that would be sure to make you more productive?

Using divergent thinking might be the answer. You can use this creative process to help generate new ideas through free-flowing brainstorming which has no structure. You can use it to explore any and all avenues you wish to, including ones you might not get a chance to investigate if you use more traditional methods of brainstorming and mind mapping. You can read about common mind-mapping mistakes if you want to find out about more traditional mind-mapping methods.

Divergent thinking works best when people using it have the time and space to get inspired, work together, warm up, and set expectations for the project you’re working on.  Using divergent thinking should also feel a little precarious to be most effective.

In the rest of this article, we’ll discover six divergent thinking exercises to come up with some fantastic, original ideas.

First, though, we must define divergent thinking.

Let’s jump in.

What is Divergent Thinking?

The concept of divergent thinking was first put forward by J.P. Guilford in 1956. It is a free-flowing, creative thought process designed to help you come up with new ideas.

Typically, when we use brainstorming or mind mapping to solve problems, we are often on the lookout for the most straightforward solution to the issue we’re facing, so we end up using lateral thinking and not exploring other options as we would in a lateral thinking exercise. When we are engaged in a process using lateral thinking, there are right and wrong answers. That’s not so with divergent thinking. Your thoughts take a more meandering path, and you can explore many more options, whether their viable options or not.

For this reason, divergent thinking has serval advantages, which we’ll detail in the next section.

Advantages of Divergent Thinking and Tips to Get You Started

So, what are the benefits of using divergent thinking to brainstorm, form new ideas, and solve problems?

It can:

• Enable you to see a problem from various angles and perspectives.
• Generate more than one idea, so you can opt for the best one.
• Encourage open-mindedness and creativity and therefore help you come up with better, more effective solutions.
• Pave the way for effective, creative collaboration.
• Help you come up with better solutions at work if the entire team gets on board with the exercise.
• Help people become more comfortable with expressing unusual or original ideas and making mistakes. People who are more comfortable with exploring new ideas, often collaborate more effectively too.  

Here’s what you can do to begin to practice divergent thinking.

Dedicated Space and Time to Brainstorm Using Divergent Thinking

If everyone is busy doing day-to-day tasks, it can be difficult for people to be truly creative, or come up with a strategy to solve anything.

If you book a specific conference or meeting room in which to brainstorm and agree on a time to have a brainstorming session, you can help participants get into the tight frame of mind to start thinking differently.

Have Between 5 and 7 Participants

Make sure your list of attendees is just right before you begin. You shouldn’t involve either too few or too many people. The best number of participants to have is between 5-7 as indicated by research. This is a group large enough to generate new ideas, but not so large as to become unmanageable.

It’s best if you invite people who have different perspectives to help guard against groupthink. You could invite people from different disciplines, departments, backgrounds, or cultures.

Set Expectations and Agree Upon Them with Your Team

Exercises in divergent thinking are most effective when everyone involved is open-minded, focused, and ready to work together. If all participants know what to expect before you begin, your brainstorming session is more likely to be productive and effective.

Always Include a Warm-Up

Warming up your mind helps get you mentally ready to be creative. You can have more structured warm-ups and do some activities to break the ice. If you fancy taking a more free-form route, you could listen to music for a few minutes or do some sketching.

Now it’s time to discover five divergent thinking exercises you can use to take brainstorming to the next level.

5 Fantastic Divergent Thinking Exercises for Effective Brainstorming

When you’ve all warmed up, feel secure, and focused, you can all unleash your creativity. We’ll explore some exercises to get you going.

We’ll use a simple problem statement to illustrate how you could use these exercises to help solve it.

Our statement is: “The number of registrations and downloads for our new supermarket shopping app has stopped increasing. We want to increase downloads by at least 20% over the course of a year.”  

Exercise 1: Freewriting

This is a free association activity. You write words, draw diagrams, doodle and jot down phrases, without stopping and without fretting about how viable an idea is, spelling or how accurate a drawing is, or working out how that idea might work in practice.   There are no invalid, wrong ideas and no constraints, aside from the time limit you might set for a freewriting session.

If you and your team prefer a little more structure, try the 6-3-5 method. Six people write three ideas each on a sheet of paper, as many times as they can over a five-minute period. Then that team member passes their sheets to the next person, so they can add their ideas.

After the freewriting session, your team may decide to expand on particular ideas or themes to come up with ways to incorporate ideas into the process of downloading or registering for the shopping app so as to address the problem statement. For example, if one of the words written was, happiness, delight, or excitement, perhaps you could start coming up with ways you could make shoppers feel more excited or happy about downloading the app.

Exercise 2: Disruptive Brainstorming (Adding Constraints)

First, brainstorm one set of ideas. Then, add a given constraint, written on a ‘Disrupt Card’. One possible constraint is written on each card. In the scenario of downloading an app then, the Disrupt Card used might be ‘Scarcity’.  If that card is selected, each team member has to think about how they might use scarcity to increase registration for and downloads of their shopping app. Someone might suggest, for instance, that you limit the number of possible downloads to 100 per day, and that you could show the available number next to the download button.

Your team can split into two or three groups, each using a different Disrupt Card to explore what they can achieve with various constraints.

After the disruptive brainstorming session, every group should come together and discuss the ideas that are most, relevant, viable, and achievable in more detail. Lastly, each team member is assigned an idea to investigate further and plan how to bring each idea to life.

Exercise 3: The One-Word Story Method

This technique lets you spontaneously expand upon the ideas of others. Someone either writes a single word or starts to draw before passing the piece of paper onto the next person in the group, so they can write down the first word that comes to them, or continue the drawing. This process continues until we have enough viable ideas to work with, that can then be narrowed down to the best ones, and taken further.

You can generate some fabulous out-of-the-box ideas with this exercise.

Exercise 4: Improvisation

You can use the popular “Yes, and…” method to encourage improvisation and open-mindedness.

It starts with one person introducing an idea. The next person must add to it in some way, and so on until all participants have contributed. For our problem statement, it might go something like this:

• Person A: We could show how long it takes to register for and download the app, so they know it’s fast and easy to do.
• Person B: Yes, and we could add a completion tracker, so people would know how far they have left to complete the registration and download.
• Yes, and we can eliminate unnecessary steps to make it simple so people are more likely to do it.

And so on.

Exercise 5: The Alternative Uses Test

J.P Guildford designed this exercise in the 1960s, as a way to come up with creative ideas and solutions from a single piece of information. This exercise will help you explore familiar ideas from a fresh perspective.

Let’s apply it to our problem statement.

The team attempts to come up with an alternative, potentially wacky ways to get people to sign up for and download the app.

Ideas your team generates may include:

• Scanning a QR code in the supermarket.
• Put posters around supermarkets promoting the app.
• Hand out leaflets to customers with a promo code to download the app.

After you have a good many ideas, you can collectively build upon the more promising ideas out of the bunch.

Wrapping Up   

We can see then, that whether you use it to help develop new ideas for work, or if you’re trying to come up with a solution to a problem in your personal life, divergent thinking is a powerful way to take your brainstorming to the next level and make them more productive and effective.

All you need is to do a little preparation before trying your favourite of the five exercises above. See how you get on.

Read about how you can use the Six Thinking Hats Method to tackle tough decisions.