Convergent Thinking: What You Need To Know

Convergent thinking is adding up old or new for correct. A series of cognitive operations converge to find the answer, and if you hadn’t this ability, you would find daily life impossible. Pivotal for human evolution. Pivotal for optimal solutions. Pivotal for creative revolutions.

Solve For Correct

No matter who and why you are, you reenact some form of convergence in the day-to-day. In order to prompt novel ideas, you diverge—break away from the mold and come up with something new. To filter your hodgepodge of innovative keyboards and cups, you converge—check whether they are actually untried and useful.

Guess what? The aforementioned cooks—in your fat neuron cluster—any time you’re deciphering a problem. Or puzzle, quiz, riddle, or dilemma. You don’t always diverge—unless you’re, like, really creative. You converge though. You converge what clothes and shoes fit together, what spices and ingredients make a tasty meal, and what keyboard suits your usage and budget. You converge to make morally and objectively wise decisions.

Adding Up

In contrast to divergent thinking, convergent thinking means seeing the commonality of phenomena that appear to be different or combining two or more observations together. Think putting the pieces of a puzzle together. Think multiple-choice tests and economical quandaries. You combine known concepts, rules, and practices, and solve. Fast.

Combining is huge. Charles Goodyear spent 5 years looking for how he could stabilize rubber for the manufacture of shoes. Did he take random substances from the periodic table and throw them on a stove until he found sulfur worked? Doubt it.

Effortful Creativity

Goodyear possessed scientific literacy and laid years of seeds of research behind him. Simply put, the result wasn’t accidental creativity. Every step, from heating the rubber, to the sulfur, was the result of earlier findings. Deliberate divergence and convergence. Deliberate creativity.

Want to come up with innovative solutions? Adhere to the principle. Creativity doesn’t spawn out of thin air. As Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favors only the prepared mind”. Creativity rests on a foundation of wisdom and effort. To be a creative figure skater, you need to be capable on the ice.

Discoveries On Purpose

Unconventional ideas are one thing. Cool candle business, shaker cup, or unprecedented use of watermelon peel, bro. Yet it goes without saying that without sufficient know-how, your creative journey is crippled. Can’t scent candles with gasoline or sell bitter ass watermelon peel? Aw, man!

Thus from the creative standpoint, there’s no easy, lucky path. There’s a reason for why experts who have been working in their field for years come up with unheard-of solutions that change lives. Not run-of-the-mill Joe. Experts, with creativity and expertise. Experts eager to explore the unfamiliar.

Divergence and Convergence

Imagine it like a sliding scale. On one side there’s the well-defined, logical, tried and true answer. Convergent. On the other sits the ill-defined, nontraditional way. Divergent. Somewhere in between are unknown answers and even questions.

Some only deviate slightly—a blender blade, cup shape, fridge color. Others swing farther—flip the blender upside-down, heating the cup, reshaping the fridge. Still others scathe completely undefined territory—combining the blender, cup, and fridge into an all-purpose, self-heating and self-cooling and self-stirring cup you can take to go.

Love Our Logic

Early humans relied on convergent thinking for survival and cooperation. Determining safe paths to migrate between caves, choosing edible plants to munch on, and developing tools. Within groups, common understandings and the transmission of skill across generations was only possible due to this process.

Modern humans rely on it too, although we value divergence—brainstorming, mind mapping. The refinement of tools, establishment of agriculture, optimization of factories, and eventually our space-age society involve convergence and divergence. Remember, you can vomit ideas all day, but you have to put the pieces together and make them worth their stay.

Structured and Predictable

The intersection of divergent and convergent thinking is the sliding scale. New ideas and perspectives, combined with old science and principles. Voila! But it does often work in isolation.

Math, where you solve a specific equation with a known method. Standardized tests with multiple-choice questions. Doctors diagnosing illnesses based on symptoms and medical history. Assembling pieces to complete a jigsaw puzzle. Deciding on the best chess move by analyzing the board. Following a recipe to cook a dish. Designing a bridge which meets safety and regulatory standards. Constructing arguments based on laws and precedents as a lawyer. Piecing together evidence to solve cases as a detective. Debugging code as a software developer. Budgeting in a way that meets financial goals and constraints. Following traffic rules and signs to drive.

The Default Way

You and I are plus or minus indoctrinated to think convergently. Understandably so. Schools mean us well when they put forth programmes centered around narrowing down the potential causes of problems. Creativity is undervalued, but at least we can quickly arrive at solutions! Prefrontal cortex, parietal lobe, and temporal lobe get their sweat on! Hooray!

To conclude, convergent thinking embraces structure and clear solutions, and is the natural tendency for most. In combination with divergent thinking, you get creativity. In isolation, it’s critical for decision-making, problem-solving, and analysis. When you need fast and structured, converge. When you need new and better, diverge. Predictability makes for consistency, not for standout results.