In our last post we discussed divergent thinking, which is the thought process used to generate many ideas related to a subject in a short amount of time. Quantity is key. The goal is to create as many ideas as possible, regardless of whether they are any good or not. Then, after we have created a critical mass of raw ideas, we shift our focus to selecting the best idea for further exploration. This process is convergent thinking, the opposite of divergent thinking. First diverge, then converge.
The converging process considers various choices in the context of the original subject and looks for a connection that is in some way valuable.
We use convergent thinking all the time, such as when we scroll through consumer websites. Think about what you would do if you visited Amazon.com to find something such as, I don’t know, maybe a “male grooming device.” A search for this term today yields 624 choices. That’s a lot of choices! It includes several types of devices including body hair groomers, men’s rotary shavers, hair finishing shavers and others. You could filter your choices by the body area in need of grooming (beard, face, armpit, nose, ear…), power source (cordless or corded), blade material (stainless, titanium…), and special features (waterproof, detachable head…), among other characteristics.
Out of curiosity, I wondered how many choices would appear for the search, “female grooming device.” This produced fewer choices than men’s choices (422), but the categories were very different (bikini trimmers, foil shavers, hair removal epilators…). Digging deeper, a search for just “grooming device” produced nearly a thousand choices, but this also included many choices designed for grooming pets.
Since I had already gone down a rabbit hole, and being a little surprised that “male grooming” produced nearly 50 percent more choices than “female grooming,” I was curious to do just a little more digging. After all, I wondered, could the market for grooming devices really be 50 percent larger for men than for women? I changed the search term from “grooming” to “pleasure,” just to see what it would yield. Again, the results were surprising. Choices for “female pleasure device” outnumbered choices for “male pleasure device” by a ratio of twelve-to-one! The results were a whopping 60,000 to 5,000 choices, respectively. If choices for consumer product reasonably reflect consumer behavior, we may infer that, 1) men are grooming themselves more than women, 2) women are pleasuring themselves more than men, and 3) there’s a LOT more self-pleasuring happening than grooming.
But I digress. This is a story about convergent thinking.
The point is, whether you’re on Amazon looking for a product that you’ll use to groom yourself or pleasure yourself or do anything else you may want to do yourself or with anyone else, you’ll be engaging in convergent thinking. You will consider each of the choices in relation to the original subject and explore the more promising choice for further consideration.
When applying convergent thinking in the context of singular linking, we are trying to find the singular idea that makes our subject pop. For an example that pops, look look no further than Viagra. The little blue pill was developed to address blood pressure, of all things, but the idea to use it as a boner pill thrust it into a much more lucrative market. Same for Botox, which was originally created to treat crossed eyes and eyelid spasms but found much more commercial application as a beauty product.
I’m not suggesting that the commercial breakthroughs of Viagra and Botox materialized by brainstorming all possible ideas for those products and then choosing the best ones. It’s not like some lab technician at Pfizer said, “Hey, I know we’re developing a blood-pressure pill but while we’re at it, should we also see if… I dunno, maybe it also helps men get erections?” (You could just see the other technicians with their lab coats and clip boards, peering silently, awkwardly over their bifocals, searching their minds for a response, wondering, “What on earth is he thinking about in the lab while we’re together all day?”) Rather, by researching how people responded to their products, their creators iterated their way to discoving new, unexpected applications. The key is the iterative process, which is what we’re trying to manufacture with divergent-convergent thinking.
We’re trying to generate ideas that lead to more new ideas that lead to still more new ideas. Eventually we find ourselves considering ideas that are several steps removed from the original subject. Their separation from the original subject is what makes them valuable. They are like distant cousins who hardly resemble one another but are related nevertheless. When we consider each of these distant ideas in relation to the original subject, occasionally we discover one that gives a whole new meaning to our original subject. This is a singular link.
Think about the history of aviation. For thousands of years inventors tried to develop flying machines by copying the flapping wings of birds. They saw that birds flap their wings to get them aloft and keep them there until they decide to come down. Couldn’t people do the same? They tried developing different mechanisms with wings, different ways of flapping, different materials that were both strong and light, but nothing worked. Eventually some built gliders that could be launched from the rooftops or hilltops and float gradually downward like paper airplanes. Others pioneered balloon flight. Still, none of them allowed for bird-like flight. It wasn’t until someone introduced the concept of thrust that aviation became possible. We already had winged vessels, but now a winged vessel rigged with a thrusting mechanism resulted in modern aviation.
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Could early inventors have discovered thrust in aviation through the processes of divergent-convergent thinking? Possibly. By the late 18th century, inventors were coming tantalizingly close to designing flying machines much like those that took to the skies in the early 20th century. It wouoldn’t be difficult to imagine a brainstorming session aimed at identifying the different ways to give a flying vessel its thrust.
- Hurl it from a catapult
- Send it down a long ramp like an Olympic ski jumper
- Fire it out of a cannon
- Fill a large balloon with air and produce thrust by controlling the release of air pressure
- Attach propellers such as those used on ships, driven by springs or coils like those that power a grandfather clock
As we know, the aviation community converged on propellors as the preferred technology.
It’s important to not overlook the fact that the eventual solution to carry people through the skies was nothing like the early ideas for carrying humans through the skies. Airplanes scarcely resembled birds and insects. It took a lot of ideation, centuries of brainstorming, many failed prototypes, countless fatalities and countless more injuries before we had developed reliable flying vessels. The goal of divergent-convergent thinking is to travel from an original concept to a working solution without ever having to leave the drawing room.
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