Generating Ideas

Creative ideas arise from divergent thinking, in which you and your team break away from familiar or established ways of seeing and doing things to come up with something new and fresh. This type of thinking allows your team to see from different perspectives, discover new connections among facts or events, and explore questions that have never been asked before.

The goal of divergent thinking is to quickly generate a wide variety of solutions for a given situation or problem without judging the merits of those options. In this step of the process, you don’t yet narrow down the options that you create. Creating and winnowing down your options at the same time is like driving with your foot on the brake: You’ll expend a lot of ...

Get Harvard Business Review 20-Minute Manager Ultimate Boxed Set (16 Books) now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.