If your development team wants to build genuinely new features or services that are innovative or “outside the box”, how would you do it?
In broad strokes, often there’s an initial design discussion to map the project requirements to a sensible idea. Then there may be a proof of concept to test any risky parts. Finally the team develops the idea into a solution, and tests it. This overall approach uses convergent thinking to identify a solution.
Would it surprise you to know this approach is firmly inside the proverbial box, and less likely to lead to a genuinely new or innovative solution?
Try divergent thinking instead
Over the years, I’ve seen many teams get better results when they approach a problem by first identifying as many diverse possibilities as they can. Initially, they seek out and welcome all ideas, lots and lots of ideas, including incompatible, unusual, or impossible ones. None of these divergent ideas are critiqued or assessed at this stage. That’s key in divergent thinking.
What is divergent thinking?
Divergent thinking isn’t the same thing as creativity—it’s an essential part of creativity. It is the ability to see:
- lots of possible ways to interpret a question.
- lots and lots of possible answers to those questions.
Divergent methods ask people to set aside linear or convergent approaches. Instead, people identify many ways to solve the problem. They let impossible ideas inspire ideas that are possible. They try different things, borrow parts of ideas from each other, let go of ownership and let go of the belief that their idea is too good to edit, or too good to combine with those of others. Only after this divergent process—after the problem space is saturated with ideas—is it time to converge, to assess, to use judgement, and to make design decisions.
Borrowing and combining each other’s ideas partway through the divergent stage is a form of design collaboration that all members of your project team contribute to. It prepares the team to embrace the inevitable, necessary changes as feedback from user research, customers and stakeholders, and QA arrives. Because the team has learned that no idea is too good to change.
How do we start ‘divergent thinking’?
Formally trained designers learned at school to use divergent thinking up front. They’re taught to explore multiple ideas and to “saturate the problem space” with ideas.
But your entire development team can benefit from divergent thinking. This approach usually saves your project months of rework. And customers benefit from better, more innovative solutions.
If you want a step-by-step method, then—after you finish reading this post—look at the Five Sketches™ method.
One software development team spent five days redesigning their mine-scheduling software into a touch-enabled user interface. The company wanted to be first to market, so there was no competitor to copy from. The team had to explore options and to innovate—something the team’s linear-thinking software developers had never done. After using the Five Sketches method for one week, the team’s development manager said: “This has saved us months of work! Months!”
That’s what divergent thinking can do for software development teams.