The source and power of divergent thinking
I was having a internet disagreement with someone that 'execution is more important than strategy'. Obviously because my job is strategy I'm clearly biased, but I'm not my job.
I believe that words like strategy represent our imaginations and we all have those.
The sayings go that we are what we do and we are here to be productive. We are not put on this Earth to be productive. We are not what we do. We simply are. We are here to live and try to figure out what that involves until we are not alive anymore.
”The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic.” Alan Watts.
All of this somehow reminded me of creativity and the role of divergent thinking. Where does it comes from and how to encourage it?
Firstly and obviously, I'm not a psychologist. I still decided to have a go at visiualising it.
Building high performing creative teams has to mean more than just combining skills.
The starting point: if creativity is about problem-solving, then how do different people respond to problems on a personal level?
To nurture creativity means to embrace the inconvenience that people can be weird and they have tendency not to agree [that's the divergent bit].
By understanding we all lie on a shifting spectrum of attitudes toward life, it's easier not to globally label or respond to different attitudes with a good / bad bias.
“Pessimism is the enemy, optimism is the answer!”
Like the making sugar, salt and fat the enemy, which has been the case for decades from governments. Science inconveniently disproves it.
“Be more realistic!”
Realism can trap a process in convergent thought.
The truth is complicated. Ideation is messy, best summed up by “the squiggle”.
Tensions are a healthy part of creativity, you get knocked-back, you try to find a different way through. To be more innovative, the creative industry especially needs to revive the art of tension. A Linkedin survey I conducted, revealed a mismatch between where effort is being expended in creative leadership and where it should be.
As a relevant aside, according to a study by Stanford university, upwards of 18% of CEOs might be considered narcissists, 3x more than the general population. They found that such CEOs are likely to place more importance on media attention and drive lower profitability.
Divergent thinking has some connection into mental health and pathological issues and therefore to create an environment of hyper-tension, will invariably lead to fatalism and break-down. It certainly won’t lead to many great ideas. So maybe try not to do that.