A team debates how to fix a mismatched table and chair. One person suggests shaving the table, another building a platform, a third just buys a new chair. The story illustrates divergent thinking: finding multiple solutions to one problem, not just the single correct answer that school teaches.
So my team has this little chair and this high table, and they had this issue where it was coming up too high. So I was looking at my toddler. They were telling me that they were thinking about cutting off the— like shaving down the legs of this table. And then they're like, oh, you know what we could do? We actually just— we could build a platform for the chair to sit on. And I was like, man, I think we could— we could just buy another chair. And so what's interesting about that is actually a really good microcosm for the difference between convergent and divergent thinking. Convergent thinking is where 1 1 2. There's only one correct answer and there's one process of getting to it. Divergent is there's one problem, but there's many potential solutions. And so oftentimes in business, we think there's only one solution to one problem, and it's because school teaches us that. But the real world is completely different. All of those problems could work, but the best one is the one that costs us the least and gets us the most for it.
