Divergent Versus Convergent Thinking: What’s the Difference?
At some point, we all encounter a complex project, problem, or opportunity at work. You might have a large, multi-faceted event to plan, a new partnership to navigate, or an emerging program to design. As you approach the project, you’ll likely encounter team members who love to brainstorm and look at the project from all angles to explore many solutions. Other team members may have a clear idea of what path to take and stick to that idea. When navigating your colleagues’ starkly different approaches to problem-solving, you may wonder, which is the best route to take to complete your project effectively and efficiently?
The answer is: both. When we approach complex issues, most of us either take a divergent approach, where we generate many choices, or a convergent approach, where we narrow the options by making clear choices. While we may gravitate toward one type of thinking in our work, both divergent and convergent thinking are vitally important to brainstorming and ideation processes. This framework comes from the human-centered design concept from IDEO, and helps ROI come up with a wide range of possible paths and choose the most effective options.. Let’s take a closer look at each type of thinking and discuss how they work together to help us solve problems.
Defining divergent and convergent thinking
To understand their value to the ideation process, it’s important to understand both divergent and convergent approaches individually. Divergent thinking can be defined simply as “going wide” or brainstorming many solutions. When we use divergent thinking we aim to be creative, ask many questions, and use our imaginations to come up with many different solutions to a problem. Divergent thinkers are excellent at understanding the needs of a project and exploring possibilities for addressing them.
Conversely, convergent thinking can be defined as “going narrow”, or deciding what to do. When we use convergent thinking we focus on narrowing down ideas, searching for answers, and being objective and fact-based. Convergent thinkers are great at making decisions about the best course of action to take. They are able to recognize where to direct focus on a project and use logic to choose a solution.
Though they are two separate ways of thinking, divergent and convergent thinking should be used together to help explore many solutions before choosing the best one. The diagram below shows how divergent and convergent thinking work together to find answers. On the left side, we see how divergent thinking takes us from a starting point to generating many different ideas. Then, convergent thinking meets us in the middle and narrows down our options until we have a finished idea.
How ROI uses divergent and convergent thinking
Divergent and convergent approaches are simple tools that have proven very effective in our work at ROI. We often work in a complexand ever-changing environment. Using divergent and convergent thinking helps us make sense of those complexities and forge a path forward without jumping to conclusions too early. Divergent and convergent thinking show up in our quarterly planning, new project development, partnership opportunities, or anytime we need to evaluate new opportunities.
Pitfalls of not using both divergent and convergent thinking
When we only use one type of thinking, we may limit ourselves and fail to realize all the possible opportunities that could come from a project.
For example, If we only use divergent thinking, we will have lots of ideas and no clear idea about how to execute them. In these scenarios, people become confused about what direction to take and may get overwhelmed by the long list of options, never fully settling on a course of action. Problems can also arise from only using convergent thinking. Though we may think picking a solution more quickly may speed up the process, it prevents us from exploring all our options; therefore, we may end up picking an inefficient solution or missing an opportunity to make a larger impact than we’d initially imagined.
Divergent and convergent thinking in action
One of the ways we use divergent and convergent thinking at ROI is inviting our community into the process. We often host meetings and use slides to explore many solutions to a problem. Once our group has a long list of ideas, we will narrow them down to two or three testable solutions we believe could work. From there, we may run tests of those solutions in our community on a small scale to find the one that offers the strongest results. This way, our most viable solutions have the chance to be investigated to understand their individual outcomes and potential benefits.
Lastly, it’s important to note that both approaches involve different sets of skills and tools; some team members may excel in one approach and struggle in the other, so it’s important to lean on different strengths of various team members. When divergent and convergent thinkers come together, they can come up with solutions that are creative, impactful and doable.
Questions about how to use divergent and convergent thinking in your next planning session? Email our co-founder, Seth Saeugling at seth@ruralopportunity.org to learn more.
