Convergent Thinking: Take Creativity to the Next Level
Remember the funnel we used earlier in the course to describe the way the creative mind works? All the exercises you’ve explored so far have helped you fill the wide part of that funnel with lots of interesting, sometimes wacky, and occasionally innovative ideas.
Now, it’s time to move on to the second stage in our DEAR model: evaluate.
Imagine there’s a filter at the bottom of your funnel. It’s where you begin to eliminate ideas and evaluate which one to take forward. It’s also the second part of the creative process: convergent thinking.
Let’s listen to Guillaume Parrou’s recommendations for applying this dimension of creativity in the workplace:
What Advice Would You Give to Professionals Who Are Expected to Innovate or Take a Creative Approach to Problem-Solving?
Without the ability to assess the best options, your ideas are just a collection of possible solutions to a problem. Develop this skill to help you examine the ideas you’ve generated and find value in one or more of them.
In this and the next two chapters, you’ll explore five key analytical skills as dimensions of creativity:
Logic
Evaluation
Reflection
Persistence
Incubation
Let’s begin with logic, the study of correct and incorrect reasoning. Logical thinkers justify their decisions based on the information they gather. They look for relationships between facts, settling on the reason that makes sense.
Logic is an essential skill in the creative process, and there are many ways you use it in the workplace. For example, you might use it to analyze user reviews before improving your website, develop a strategy to recruit a more diverse workforce, or even survey clients on their coaching needs.
How can logic help me hone my creative solutions?
Avoid Logical Leaps
Logical thinking means noticing details. As individuals, our inner biases, the way we engage with our senses and interact with our environment cause us to perceive things differently. However, the assumptions we make as a result aren’t necessarily factual.
For example, let’s imagine that two people use the same website to buy concert tickets. Person A logs on, finds their ticket, clicks through to the basket, and makes their purchase. Person B struggles to make the same purchase because they find it difficult to navigate the site, and their connection keeps crashing. Person B says the site is terrible and will never use it again. However, this is an observation, not a fact, and is also known as a logical leap.
To determine if the website is terrible would mean looking at its functionality, user-friendliness, internal search engine, and design.
Logical thinking involves separating the facts, statistics, or details in an idea from personal observations to assess its viability. We can throw ourselves quite passionately behind our creative ideas, but logic will help keep us grounded in reality!
Create a Strategy for Your Idea
Think of logic as a chain by taking the essential facts and information and arranging them in a sequence (just like links in a chain). Each link takes your creative idea from it’s logical start right through to its conclusion. Ask yourself, “Does it make sense?”
Merely mapping out your idea as a series of steps will help you see how well (or not!) your idea can work.
Complete Your Creativity Journal
Do: Think of a task you completed that involved creative problem-solving (i.e., such as repairing something that’s broken at home or creating a spreadsheet at work). Break it into a series of steps.
Reflect: Did you have more than one possible creative solution to the problem? How did you use logic to decide on the best answer? How many steps did it involve? How did one step lead logically into the next? Can you lose any of the steps to complete the task any quicker? Can you complete the steps in a different order? Is there a more logical way to complete it?
Let’s Recap!
Thinking logically helps you examine a range of creative ideas to find value in one.
Logic is the study of correct and incorrect reasoning.
Focus on facts, information, and statistics rather than personal observation.
Map out your ideas as a series of steps.
Now that you can apply logic to your creative ideas, you’re ready to assess their viability using evaluation tools.
