Where do the good ideas come from?

Where do the good ideas come from?

The good idea is one that, when we hear it, the first thing that comes to mind is: "How had it not occurred to me before?" It seems so obvious as if it had always been there, by our side.

And it is: it is "next door". It is about lateral or divergent thinking. It is called that because it diverges, that is, it separates and offers more creative solutions to a situation than those that would normally occur to us.

When we evaluate a problem, we can think of a habitual pattern to solve it according to our previous experiences, which limits the possible solutions. For example, a clothesline is only for hanging clothes to dry. For that, it serves only according to our experience. However, it can also be used as decoration, to hang pictures inside the house. Or how about hanging them from an old fishing rod? Or of the branches of a tree drawn on the wall for those relatives? Divergent thinking is one that breaks with that rigid scheme and goes along nontraditional paths. To a problem (hanging the photographs), more solutions are offered than a simple picture frame, which is the first thing that comes to mind based on our experience and learned patterns. This unique automatic solution would be rather convergent thinking, which usually seeks a single answer to a problem and organizes all the information to reach it. It is the typical one by which traditional education is governed, whereof all the possible options in an exam question only one is correct.

Some pedagogical theories indicate that we all have this type of thinking more developed in early childhood, when we have not yet gone through the educational system and we must decipher the world for ourselves, without previous parameters. That is why the way of seeing the lives of children often surprises us. They give definitions and approaches to issues in ways that would never have occurred to us, but that have a strong logic.

The Maltese psychologist Edward De Bono was the one who coined the term divergent thinking, stating that it is a way of organizing thought processes through non-traditional strategies. These include finding analogies, ignoring a characteristic of the problem to be able to analyze it from other points of view, or moving away from stereotypes and considering even the most absurd solutions, to expand the mind towards other horizons.

Do not confuse, however, divergent thinking with creative. The divergent is rather a characteristic of creativity, which is more involved with the imagination than with logical-rational thinking.

The next time you face a dilemma, try to launch your divergent thinking. No matter how absurd the solutions that come to mind may seem to you, the idea is that you experience new ways of seeing life and train every day. Deal with brainstorming, make mind maps or pay more attention to your dreams as soon as you wake up in the morning.

Anyway: dare to think differently.