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Thinking outside the box (also thinking out of the box [1] [2] or thinking beyond the box and, especially in Australia, thinking outside the square [3]) is an idiom that means to think differently, unconventionally, or from a new perspective. The phrase also often refers to novel or creative thinking.
Divergent thinking, on the other hand, involves the creative generation of multiple answers to an open-ended prompt (e.g. "How can a chair be used?"). [ 53 ] Divergent thinking is sometimes used as a synonym for creativity in psychological literature or is considered the necessary precursor to creativity. [ 54 ]
Creativity techniques are methods that encourage creative actions, whether in the arts or sciences. They focus on a variety of aspects of creativity, including techniques for idea generation and divergent thinking, methods of re-framing problems, changes in the affective environment and so on.
Convergent thinking is the opposite of divergent thinking as it organizes and structures ideas and information, which follows a particular set of logical steps to arrive at one solution, which in some cases is a "correct" solution. The psychologist J. P. Guilford first coined the terms convergent thinking and divergent thinking in 1956.
The first to apply the word "creativity", however, was the 17th-century Polish poet Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski—but he applied it only to poetry. For over a century and a half, the idea of human creativity met with resistance, because the term "creation" was reserved for creation "from nothing".
Convergent thinking is a fundamental tool in a child's education. Today, most educational opportunities are tied to one's performance on standardized tests that are often multiple choice in nature. [19] When a student contemplates the possible answers available, they use convergent thinking to weigh alternatives within a construct.
It typically includes such techniques as free writing, free speaking, word association, and drawing a mind map, which is a visual note taking technique in which people diagram their thoughts. Individual brainstorming is a useful method in creative writing and has been shown to be superior to traditional group brainstorming. [12] [13]
Systematic inventive thinking (SIT) is a thinking method developed in Israel in the mid-1990s. Derived from Genrich Altshuller's TRIZ engineering discipline, SIT is a practical approach to creativity, innovation and problem solving, which has become a well known methodology for innovation. At the heart of SIT's method is one core idea adopted ...