1. Techniques for divergent thin ing.

You can use lots of different divergent thin ing tools to help you in aproblem solving process. Though lots of them are already available,others you can create on your own! Here, youll find the most famousones in order to ease this process, in case you need to practice divergent thin ing anywhere. You might have heard of them, but still...BrainstormingThis i s the classic one. Everybody already heard about it. You start withone propositi on - basically the statement of your actual problem - and goeverywhere your mind ta es you to, without restricting any thought.The goal is to get the biggest nu mber of them, not to worry about thequality of them. You can use pen and paper, if wor ing with a group,but a recorder will be much more helpful - specially if people cannotwait for their turn.BrainwritingIts nothing more than a silent, qui et brainstorm. Instead of sharingideas as they come along, each person involved in the situation scribblesdown his bunch of thought in a piece of paper. You can use models onthese papers to stimulate peoples ideas. You can draw 9 boxes - 3 rowsand 3 columns - and as everyone to fill one row with his ideas and putthe p aper bac on a pile with everyones suggestions. Then, all of youshould get a dif ferent piece of paper and redo the tas , till all the papersare filled with bran d new ideas. This is interesting because people canuse others ideas to help trig ger their own. 2. ScamperA given lineup of questions divergent thin ing, instead of ta ing youstraight to the more logical way. Scamper stands for:Substitute;Combine;Adapt ;Modify;Put to other uses;Eliminate;Rearrange.By going through this selection of questions, in any order, one might beable to get different points of view about the problem. For example, ifpeople are searching for a solution to reduce cost inside a corporation,the first idea that always goes to anyones mind is to elimi nate expenses- most of the times, expenses with personnel. Instead of that, as q uestions li e, how can we rearrange our people in order to ma e themmore useful so we wont need to cut anything?You can also play with words, visual connections , random suggestions...There are lots of ways to encourage ones divergent thin i ng. Theresjust one thing you should not do during this process: to be judgmental .Never start analyzing the ideas that appear in a divergent thin ingmeeting, for this can only ma e people refrain from it. The selection andthe evaluation of i deas have to begin only after the divergent section isover and many ideas are av ailable - regardless of how strange they loo .