Creative Thinking · Lesson 1 of 3

Divergent and convergent thinking

Name which mode you are in. Opening and closing at once produces the obvious answer with extra steps.

6 min read · Free — no account needed to read

Divergent thinking opens: many options, no judgement, quantity over quality. Convergent thinking closes: compare, cut, choose. Both are necessary, and running them at the same time is what makes brainstorming so often disappointing.

The practical rule is to separate them by time and to say out loud which one you are in. Twenty minutes of options with judgement explicitly suspended, then a break, then evaluation. The break matters more than it sounds — it is what stops the first good idea from anchoring everything after it.

Quantity genuinely helps. The first five ideas are usually what anyone would say. Ideas eleven to twenty are where the interesting ones live, and you only reach them by continuing past the point where it feels finished.

See it happen

You need a name for a small side project and you have been going round for an hour.

The read that arrives on its own

Two candidates, both fine, neither good. Pick the less bad one.

The same situation, with this idea

Twenty minutes, thirty names, nothing rejected — including the obviously terrible ones. Then, separately, pick. Names 18 and 24, which only appeared because the first fifteen had been used up, are the interesting ones.

What changed

The hour produced two options because each idea was judged as it arrived. The obvious ones have to be spent before anything else is reachable.

The takeaway

Name which mode you are in. Opening and closing at once produces the obvious answer with extra steps.

Easy to take the wrong way

Calling five minutes of listing "divergent thinking". The useful material sits past the point where it starts feeling unproductive — that feeling is the signal, not the stop sign.

Try this

Set a timer for ten minutes and list twenty options for something. Do not stop at the good one.