5 Essential Mental Models for Boosting Your Creativity

Hello there! Welcome to the Dialogic Learning Weekly. It’s Friday, February 20. I’m Tom, writing to you from Melbourne, Australia. Thanks for spending part of your day with me. Reach out with comments, questions and feedback at tom@dialogiclearning.com or on Twitter at @tombarrett. If someone forwarded you this email, subscribe to get the Dialogic Learning Weekly sent straight to your inbox.

Photo by jet dela cruz on Unsplash

In our last issue, we explored the notion of innate creative thinking. Today, we look at mental models associated with ideas, creativity, and originality.

1. Divergent Thinking
2. Convergent Thinking
3. The Innovation Jolt Model
4. The Creative Habit Model
5. The Creative Process Model

Regardless of the model, we use to understand creativity, at its heart is a desire and an intention to be creative. Our focus will be: how we can create the right intention to be more creative.

Divergent Thinking

Divergent thinking involves exploring lots of possible solutions to a problem. At the same time, convergent thinking looks for the correct answer to a specific problem.

Culturally, we are trained to think in ‘right or wrong’ terms and that the only way to be creative is to come up with new ‘right’ answers. When we feel like this, it is impossible to be genuinely innovative.

I often describe Divergent Thinking as a mode when we generate lots of different options. It is an expansive and open mode of thinking.

Convergent Thinking

We narrow down the options in convergent thinking, finding a smaller selection of possibilities.

Convergent thinking is often described as a more analytical and closed mode. Usually, this is done by filtering or voting on collections of ideas or datasets.

When we think in convergent thinking mode, we are not open to new ideas because we attempt to make decisions.

Example questions to encourage convergent thinking:

• Which five ideas have the most potential?
• Which of the questions sums up your…