Catalog
concept#Product#Delivery#Governance

Divergent Thinking

A creativity approach for generating many diverse ideas and perspectives in early innovation phases.

Divergent thinking is a creative approach aimed at generating many varied ideas and challenging assumptions.
Established
Medium

Classification

  • Medium
  • Organizational
  • Design
  • Intermediate

Technical context

Design sprints into product processesBacklog and experiment management toolsUser research and prototyping workflows

Principles & goals

Quantity before quality in early phasesSuspend judgment to avoid blocking creativityEncourage diversity: include interdisciplinary perspectives
Discovery
Domain, Team

Use cases & scenarios

Compromises

  • Excessive idea volume without implementation focus
  • Groupthink if diversity is lacking
  • Wasted time if there is no clear follow-up
  • Strictly enforce no-evaluation rules during divergence
  • Invite interdisciplinary teams to expand perspectives
  • Document results immediately and plan follow-up

I/O & resources

  • Clear problem definition or objective
  • User or market data as inspiration
  • Interdisciplinary participant group
  • Large idea collection
  • Prioritized solution options
  • Concrete experiment or prototype ideas

Description

Divergent thinking is a creative approach aimed at generating many varied ideas and challenging assumptions. It supports exploration, prototyping, and unconventional solutions during early product and innovation phases. Typical settings include workshops, design sprints, and problem framing; it requires an open mindset and facilitation skills.

✔

  • Generates broad solution spaces and reduces early narrowing
  • Boosts team creativity and engagement
  • Enables early identification of novel opportunities

✖

  • Outputs are often unstructured and require substantial filtering
  • Requires facilitation and methodological discipline
  • Alone it does not automatically lead to validated solutions

  • Ideas per session

    Number of ideas generated as a coarse indicator of divergence.

  • Share of novel concepts

    Percentage share as a measure of novelty of proposals.

  • Implementation rate after follow-up

    How many ideas lead to experiments or implementations.

Design sprint at a SaaS product

A product team used divergent thinking to develop three radically different prototypes and validate user assumptions.

Ideation workshop in an NGO

Freely generated measures were collected and subsequently transformed into pilot projects.

Internal hackathon phase

Divergent thinking helped identify unconventional approaches that were later scaled.

1

Define objective and communicate context.

2

Select participants and set a timebox.

3

Apply divergent methods and collect ideas.

4

Cluster, prioritize and plan the next validation step.

⚠️ Technical debt & bottlenecks

  • Unmaintained idea collections without categorization
  • Missing traceability from ideas to experiments
  • Process gaps between divergence and validation
Limited facilitation capacityLack of team diversityMissing resources for follow-up
  • Brainstorming without focus leads to irrelevant idea sets
  • Applying divergence in late implementation phases instead of early exploration
  • Only creativity sessions without user validation
  • Confusing divergence with lack of planning
  • Over-moderation that stifles ideas
  • Insufficient resources to translate into experiments
Facilitation and visualization techniquesMethod knowledge (brainstorm, SCAMPER, brainwriting)Basic understanding of user research
Need for early explorationInterdisciplinary collaborationRapid learning through prototyping
  • • Timeboxed sessions required
  • • Clear problem statement necessary
  • • Facilitation skills and method knowledge