In a previous blog post I spoke about how convergent thinking arrives too soon.
We rarely get to silence the critic in our head for long enough to have a good idea.
Which is a shame because we weren’t always like this.
Remember when you were 5 and the ideas just flew off the top of your tongue without any worries of how practical they were.
You’d say things like:
Maybe we could get the Queen to come and pick us up in her ice cream van.
Or
We’ll fly there on those seagulls over there!
Or
We can just ask Santa for a ride on his sleigh.
It would be considered adorable because you were 5 but if you were to make those suggestions as a 25 year old, we’d judge you, we’d judge you hard! In fact we’d probably think you were being sarcastic and we’d get really annoyed with you for wasting our time.
Somewhere along the line our default setting changed from imaginative divergent thinking to convergent critical thinking as we were pressured to become a realistic adult.
That may cause annoyance but it’s also a reason to be optimistic because if you could do it before, you could get it back.
George Land suggests a great way to develop that brainstorming ability.
He says take a random everyday household object like a fork and list 30 uses for it.
You’ll quickly find that the first few are easy but after that you’ll have to stretch and start thinking outside the box and that’s where the major growth will come from.
Thomas Duggan 