Divergence and quantity

You might have heard this before: you need to have a lot of bad ideas to have a good idea. It’s a math game, and it’s very darwinian if you think about it. But how do you get a lot of (bad) ideas so you’re able to get to the good ones? To get to better ones?

A bunch of things can help and maybe the most important are: interesting framing, lots of practice and stimuli. The framing is what helps us converge on a interesting problem to solve and stimuli help us diverge. The practice is of course, the engine.

In today’s knowledge economy, we often need to align, coordinate, colaborate, connect the dots. Convergence is a force that underpins all of that. What school forgets to tell us, or misleads us into believing, is that convergence is how we solve problems.

But what if I told you solving meaningful problems requires you to cycle through loops of converge AND diverge? And that gets you better solutions than if you just converge? Because ultimately, you can have one problem BUT multiple solutions for it. Without divergence though, you don’t really have enough fuel for quantity, for opening up the possibility of more solutions.

Meanwhile, divergence is not really… taught. But it’s one of those things that once you know, it’s a whole lot of fun to play with. Here’s 3 ways you can be better at divergence: steal inspiration from different fields, bring different and preferably conflicting points of view as stimuli, surround yourself with people from distinctly different tribes. We think about it as bringing in different shapes, colours and types of LEGO bricks before getting to build. More fun? Definitely! Can we build more? YEA! Can you have too many? Umm… yes, there’s a diminishing return and a bit of choice paralysis after a point. But then, practice helps us navigate how broad and how deep we do our divergence. Meanwhile, play with it! It will get easier. That’s how you oil the engine of practice.