Don’t Hastily Abandon Divergent Thinking

I've observed that a divergent mindset is something that many folks like to get out of as quickly as possible. As soon as a reasonably good idea comes up, there's almost a collective sigh of relief which says, "Whew! We did it! Mission accomplished!" (The unspoken sentiment: "Let's move on now; no more divergence -- or the discomfort that accompanies the unknown -- necessary!")

I heard about a fascinating study, called "The Creative Cliff Illusion," which at least explained this phenomenon in part: folks just assume their best ideas come early in the idea generation process, and that they will "run out of good material" pretty quickly.

I have mentioned Ian Leslie’s "Curious," before, and his powerful assertion that "Information fuels curiosity by creating awareness of ignorance, which gives rise to a desire to know more." He points out another university experiment that sheds light on the phenomenon I mention above:

"In 1987 researchers at the University of Oklahoma ran an experiment in which they gave students a series of problems to solve and asked them to generate as many solutions as they could... The students came up with about three hundred solutions... After the students had generated their answers, they were asked to estimate what percentage of possible good solutions they thought they had come up with. Separately, a panel of experts had been asked to compile a database of the possible solutions. Understandably, given their efforts, the individuals guessed that they had landed on three out of four possible solutions. However, when their answers were matched against the experts' database, it turned out that the average participant had generated only about one in three of the best solutions. The participants had missed most of the best ideas."

This makes perfect sense to me, and accords with much of what I have observed: folks do a "quick sprint" to generate ideas, and if they've got a few good ones (especially if they're unexpected and seemingly novel!) they wrongly conclude they've exhausted the pool of possible solutions and snap back to a convergent mindset. But they potentially move beyond the divergent mindset much earlier than they really should. Assuming the goal is to identify and implement the best solution possible, these studies would suggest they've declared victory a little prematurely...

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