15 Divergent Thinking Examples You Can Practice Today
Divergent thinking examples show what it looks like to generate many possible ideas from a single starting point — rather than converging on a single correct answer. The classic laboratory version is the Alternative Uses Test: given "a brick," generate as many distinct uses as you can in two minutes. But divergent thinking shows up everywhere: in scientific discovery, product design, artistic process, and everyday problem solving.
Here are 15 divergent thinking examples across different domains, including several you can practice directly.
What Makes an Example "Divergent"
A quick note on what counts: divergent thinking is measured by fluency (how many ideas), flexibility (how many distinct categories they span), originality (how unusual they are), and elaboration (how developed each idea is).
An example qualifies as divergent thinking when someone generates multiple distinct possibilities before selecting or evaluating any of them. If only one option is explored, the thinking is convergent — no matter how creative that single idea is.
Divergent Thinking Examples from Science
1. Darwin's theory of natural selection. Darwin didn't start with the theory and search for evidence. He spent years collecting observations from radically different domains — breeding practices in England, fossil records, island species distribution, comparative anatomy — before a mechanism emerged from the aggregate pattern. The divergent phase was his extraordinary range of data-gathering across fields that weren't conventionally linked. Many naturalists had access to similar observations. Darwin's divergent habit of mind was what connected them.
2. Fleming's discovery of penicillin. When Alexander Fleming noticed that bacteria weren't growing near a mold contamination in his petri dish, he didn't discard the contaminated sample, as lab protocol would normally dictate. He also didn't immediately converge on "this is an antibiotic." He generated a range of possible explanations for what he was seeing. That divergent step — entertaining multiple hypotheses rather than dismissing the anomaly — is what led him to investigate further.
3. Velcro. George de Mestral returned from a hike in the Swiss Alps with burrs stuck to his jacket. Instead of simply removing them, he examined them under a microscope and asked why they attached so effectively. He then generated a list of possible applications for the hooking mechanism across industries. The divergent question — "what else could this mechanical property be useful for?" — turned a hiking annoyance into a fastening technology used in everything from medical devices to spacesuits.
Divergent Thinking Examples from Design and Business
4. IDEO's shopping cart redesign. When IDEO was tasked with redesigning a supermarket shopping cart, they spent the first phase gathering observations from diverse groups without evaluating them: children, elderly shoppers, people with mobility limitations, stock workers, checkout clerks. No idea screening during collection. This divergent phase surfaced problems — safety, theft, organization, hygiene — that a conventional product-centric approach would have missed entirely.
5. Amazon's expanding business model. Amazon's early strategic planning involved generating multiple possible futures for the company simultaneously: a standard retailer, an open marketplace, a platform, a logistics provider, a cloud infrastructure company, a hardware manufacturer. Rather than committing to one lane, the team held multiple possibilities open and invested in each when the opportunity arose. Each leg of the Bezos "flywheel" came from a divergent phase that rejected the assumption that Amazon had to be one thing.
6. Post-it Notes. Spencer Silver invented a repositionable adhesive at 3M in 1968 that was weaker than existing adhesives — a failure by the project's original goals. Instead of discarding it, 3M's culture encouraged divergent thinking about what a weak but reusable adhesive could be useful for. It took six years and Art Fry's insight about bookmark adhesion before the right application emerged. The divergent question kept the invention alive long enough to become one of the best-selling office products in history.
7. Slack's pivot from gaming. The company that became Slack started as a gaming company called Glitch, which was failing. Rather than doubling down on the original concept, the team divergently explored what they had actually built well. Their internal messaging system — developed to coordinate a distributed game-development team — was the real product. Recognizing that required generating possibilities outside the original frame.
Divergent Thinking Examples from Art
8. Picasso's process for Guernica. Picasso produced over 40 preparatory sketches for Guernica before arriving at the final composition. Each sketch explored a different organizational principle, spatial arrangement, or symbolic representation of the bombing of Guernica. Some sketches were radically different from others. This is divergent thinking as artistic process: generating a range of possible visual solutions before committing, rather than executing the first acceptable idea.
9. Jazz improvisation. In jazz performance, musicians generate sequences of notes in real time without predetermined selection criteria. The divergent capacity — holding open multiple harmonic and rhythmic options simultaneously and selecting among them fluidly — is the core technical skill that distinguishes jazz from classical performance. Musicians with broader harmonic vocabularies generate more distinct options; the performance quality tracks the quality of the divergent phase.
Divergent Thinking Examples You Can Practice
The following are structured exercises, not just passive illustrations. Each one develops a specific dimension of divergent thinking.
10. Alternative Uses Test. Take a common object — a newspaper, a chair, a toothpick — and generate as many distinct uses as you can in two minutes. The critical word is distinct: "hold together paper" and "hold together fabric" count as one category, not two. What matters is how many different categories you span. The divergent thinking exercise runs this test properly and gives you a score you can track over time.
11. Problem reframing. Take a current problem and write five completely different formulations of it. Not solutions — framings. "How do we reduce customer churn?" becomes "What value are customers failing to realize they're getting?" or "What does staying look like from the customer's perspective three months in?" or "What would our product need to become to be something customers actively recommend?" Each framing opens a different solution space.
12. Random word forced connections. Open a dictionary to a random page, select a noun, and generate as many connections as you can between that word and a problem you're working on. "Lighthouse" forced onto a customer service problem surfaces properties like visibility from a distance, unambiguous signal, no two-way communication required, and operates autonomously in all weather. None of those properties were in the original problem frame. Some of them belong there. The lateral thinking technique of random entry formalizes this procedure.
13. Reverse brainstorming. Instead of asking "How do we solve this problem?", ask "How could we guarantee failure?" or "What would make this problem dramatically worse?" Generate as many ways as possible to achieve the opposite goal. Then reverse each one. Reverse brainstorming works because the generation phase is easier when framed as criticism — evaluation apprehension drops, and ideas surface that wouldn't have appeared in a constructive frame.
14. Attribute listing. Break a product or concept into its constituent attributes. For each attribute, list as many alternatives as you can imagine without evaluating them. If one attribute of a chair is "four legs," alternatives include: three legs, one leg, no legs (magnetic suspension), floor-mounted, user-adjustable number. The divergent phase focuses on one attribute at a time, which prevents the cognitive load of simultaneously generating and organizing a complete solution.
15. Six Thinking Hats (green hat phase). Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats method structures group discussion into distinct cognitive modes. The "Green Hat" phase is pure divergent thinking — no evaluation allowed, only generation. Separating generation from evaluation structurally is what makes this method effective. In groups, social pressure to converge is enormous; explicit role assignment counteracts it.
Why Divergent Thinking Examples Matter for Practice
J.P. Guilford introduced the divergent/convergent distinction in 1950, arguing that standard intelligence tests measured only one dimension of cognitive ability. The subsequent six decades of research have confirmed his core claim: divergent thinking predicts real-world creative output across domains.
What the research has also shown is that divergent thinking improves with practice. Teresa Amabile's work at Harvard demonstrated that people who regularly practice idea-generation without premature evaluation develop denser, more flexible associative networks. The creative process depends on a robust divergent phase to generate the raw material that convergent thinking then evaluates and refines. Both phases are trainable, and both require deliberate practice to develop.
The 15 examples above show what the divergent phase looks like at different scales: a flash of associative insight, a systematic generation procedure, and a years-long exploratory process. All three are forms of the same underlying cognitive capacity.
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