Ideation and Divergence Techniques

Ideation and Divergence Techniques

My recent article titled A Designer’s Approach to Strategy Crafting advocated for a fresh alternative to traditional strategic planning methodologies. The approach includes multiple tools adapted from design thinking tailored to produce strong, viable strategies with inherent buy-in from stakeholders. There are three key activities that deserve more detail than I provided in the article – divergence, convergence, and prototyping. This article takes a deeper dive into ideation and divergence techniques.

Divergence Defined

The word diverge is a verb that means to deviate from a set course or standard. In mathematics it means to increase a group of things indefinitely as more components are added. Divergence is a partner word, a noun that indicates a drawing apart from some central point. The word ideation is a noun, the formation of ideas or concepts. Taken together in the domain of strategy crafting these concepts represent a large body of techniques to help individuals or organizations change course over time and do something new – a key component for innovation. There are many approaches, models, and methodologies for generating ideas – collectively, these processes are in essence ways to diverge from a starting point and create choices.

I focus on four stages in the design process for the purposes of strategy crafting. These four stages provide a sound foundation for a large variety of possible planning tools and experiences. Each phase has a specific set of outcomes and goals and these outputs serve as important inputs to the next stage of the process.

Divergent, or generative, thinking has several characteristics and all of the methods have the outcome of increasing the number of options being considered. During idea generation, individuals and groups work to identify new ideas and solutions and see things differently then they are now.

Early methods. While we can only imagine the origins of idea generation through history (I’m sure some scholar wrote a book or dissertation on this), we do know early methods to codify the creative process appeared in writing in the 1940s and 50s. An early, seminal work was Wake Up Your Mind (1952) by Alex Osborn that introduced a method for creative problem solving with three key steps:

1. Fact-Finding: including problem definition and preparation by gathering pertinent data

2. Idea-Finding: idea production and development as selecting, modifying, and combining initial ideas

3. Solution-Finding: evaluation of tentative solutions and adoption, implementing the final solution

The idea finding process outlined several key components of typical sessions, which included: 12+/- participants – defer judgment – focus on quantity – withhold criticism – welcome unusual ideas – combine and improve ideas. A while back, I found a curious graphic on Wikipedia that depicted the process, shown below.

The creative problem solving process continued to evolve along with collaborators like Sidney Parnes and others in the years that followed. The key engine remained ideation and divergent thinking.

What’s happened lately? In the last twenty years practices and methods for ideation have grown in number, application, and reach. Design and innovation experts have proliferated and you can most likely find someone in your network with basic facilitation skills to develop and lead ideation sessions. In my last article, I reviewed six models for design and innovation and would like to reproduce the summary table below, highlighting the ideation and divergence stages in each.

No matter which design model you use, divergence has similar characteristics. It increases the number of options being considered moving away from current practice, standards, or ways of thinking. Ideation seeks to identify new ideas and sometimes requires repeated or unusual methods to stimulate thinking. One approach is to look to the intersection of disciplines or practices to see what emerges. The process seeks to see things differently than they are now. During ideation, participants are asked to remove judgment and to wish for the moon. And finally, there is usually time and effort dedicated to refining and developing ideas into better ones.

General Model	Ambrose/Harris	IDEO	Ogilvie	Plattner	Brodnick
define the problem	define	discovery	what is?	understand	collaborative design & direction setting
	research	interpretation		observe	discovery, research, & assessment
explore, create, refine			what if?	point of view
	ideate			ideate	divergent thinking, & ideation
		ideation
					convergent thinking, filtering, & selecting
			what wows?
	prototype	experimentation		prototype	prototyping & piloting
implement preferred solution	select
	implement	evolution	what works?	test	implementation, tracking, & adjusting course
	learn

Next week, I will present a simple model for designing and delivering ideation sessions.