To diverge, in the English Language is to separate or leave, as in “She diverged from the path.” In the parlance of creativity, Divergence, and divergent thinking, takes on a specific and somewhat different meaning. It speaks of allowing your brain to diverge in many directions and generate ideas and solutions as diverse and inventive as possible. It is an integral part of creative thinking, and is accompanied, often, by its opposite, convergent thinking. As you probably guessed from context clues, convergent thinking is the act of narrowing, whittling, reducing said ideas into a usable group.

Divergence

For people who are natural divergent thinkers (like moi) divergence is fun, and ideas come from so many places in your brain, it can feel like effervescence. I gain energy as I diverge.  I’ve come across many colleagues in my 20+ years as a professional brainstormer, who find divergence exhausting. Understandable, but for me it is all fun and frivolity.

In many circles, Divergence is considered synonymous with creativity. When it certainly can only be considered half of creativity. Without convergence, you only have ideas – no product, no output. But we all love new ideas, and new territory. We love the humor, novelty and invention of divergence.

Test your Divergence

There are many tests of creativity that were developed to help psychologists and teachers know the creativity level of their patients and students. For the record, convergence is widely tested and understood via normal grading of papers, tests, etc.

Testing divergence is a way to see a type of thinking that is not necessarily seen and appreciated in classrooms (or workplaces.) Below is the Alternative Uses test developed by J.P. Guilford in 1967.  Take a whack at it, directions are below. (Come on, it’ll be fun!)

Alternative Uses Test

The Alternative Uses Test measures divergent thinking – the ability to send your mind into divergent directions and categories to get ideas.  Go ahead, stretch your creativity by trying to think of as many uses as possible for an everyday object like a pencil, flash drive, fan or stick of gum.

Example: A stick of gum. How many alternative uses can you come up for chewing gum within 2 minutes?

Set a timer, and go. Here’s mine:

  • freshen breath
  • stick papers to a wall
  • chew & sculpt into small animals
  • level a chair
  • string together a bouquet of flowers
  • string from wall to wall and adhere decorations
  • stop up a hole
  • produce an episode of McGyver

Try it yourself:

How many uses can you think of for a pair of eyeglasses?

  • You have 5 minutes… Go!

Please post your list – or at least your wackiest ideas – in the FB Group, Write Without the Fight. It’ll be fun to see and share. There’ll be a post where you can leave your additions as a comment!

How Creativity is Measured by Science

If this test were being graded by a creativity professional, they’d judge your divergent thinking in 4 ways – fluency, originality, flexibility and elaboration.

  • Fluency – how many ideas you can come up with within a time limit
    • From the gum example: “Freshen breath” would not count since it is not an alternative use of a stick of gum, rather its intended use
  • Originality – how statistically uncommon those ideas are
    • From the gum example: “Stick paper to a wall” is likely less original/more common than the idea: “Produce an episode of McGyver“
  • Flexibility – how many areas/categories your answers cover
    • From the gum example: If your answers were all in one category – like sticking things to things, that would show less flexibility than the list above, drawing from many different ways to use the gum, though not so flexible as to have considered uses in fantasy, space, law, cooking or Olympic sports, for example. Flexibility is based on diversity of realms from which the ideas come.
  • Elaboration – level of detail in responses
    • From the gum example: “string from wall to wall and adhere decorations” would be worth more than “stop up a hole.” And greater elaboration would be exhibited in a response like, “Stop up a hole where the rain gets in, to stop my mind from wandering.” (Which, btw, wouldn’t get Originality points, har har.)

So what can you take from all this? How divergent is your thinking? How might you push your thinking into greater fluency (strive for quantity), greater originality (push for novel, unique ideas), greater flexibility, (list categories for ideas, and brainstorm within each bucket for greater breadth of ideation) and greater elaboration, (add detail, emotion, elegance.)

Onward Divergers! Let’s create the universe! (See you in the FB Group.)