improvements will you suggest in a chair so that it becomes more comfortable and aesthetically pleasing? What will happen if examinations are abolished in schools? Answers to the above questions require divergent thinking which is an open-ended thinking where the individual can think of different answers to the questions or problems in terms of her/his experiences. Such kind of thinking helps in producing novel and original ideas.
Divergent thinking abilities generally include fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration. Fluency is the ability to produce many ideas for a given task or a problem. The more ideas a person produces, the higher his fluency ability. For example, more the number of uses of a paper cup, more would be the fluency.
Flexibility indicates variety in thinking. It may be thinking of different uses of an object, or different interpretation of a picture, story or different ways of solving a problem. In case of uses of a paper cup, for example, one may give an idea to use it as a container or to draw a circle, etc. Fig.
. : Thinking Divergently Originality is the ability to produce ideas that are rare or unusual by seeing new relationships, combining old ideas with new ones, looking at things from different perspectives etc. Research has shown that fluency and flexibility are the necessary conditions for originality. The more and varied ideas one produces, the greater the likelihood of original ideas.
Elaboration is the ability that enables a person to go into details and workout implications of new ideas. Divergent thinking abilities facilitate generation of a variety of ideas which may not seem to be related. For example, what are the common ideas for enhancing food production? The likely answers would be related to quality of seeds, fertilizers, irrigation, and so on.
If someone thinks of cultivation in a desert for extracting protein from weeds, it would be a remote idea. The association here is between ‘food production’ and ‘desert’ or ‘weeds’. Ordinarily, we do not associate these together. But, if we let our mind free to seek new and remote associations, a number of