I hope that in my recent posts I’ve made the case for the need for divergent thinking in our work as engineers (and other humans). If you’d like a recap, here’s some recent posts on this topic.
- Convergent poem
- A sub-optimal walk in the hills
- Divergent poem
- The trap of the same way as before
- When the joke isn’t funny anymore
I say all this because, in the coming weeks on this blog, I’m going to be delving into strategies for having better ideas, both for ourselves and also in the teams we lead. These tools come under the broad heading of How to Have Better Ideas.
To get ready, I’d like you to go to the Settings Page on your brain and navigate to Thinking>Modes, find the settings for the following: prioritisation; risk-aversity; simplification; validation; tidiness; disambiguation and doubt – and toggle these to off. We’re now ready to start our journey into the land of divergent thinking.