Table of Contents
Table of Contents

Collaboration

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  • Divergence and Convergence

The design thinking creative process: diverge to create choices, converge to refine ideas and make decisions, and repeat. The design thinking creative process: diverge to create choices, converge to refine ideas and make decisions, and repeat.

The Creative Process consists of cycles of divergent and convergent thinking.


  • The Creative Process contains multiple cycles of iteration—with each phase, you move closer to a refined solution.
  • In Divergence—teams go wide to find insights and generate new ideas.
  • In Convergence—teams narrow their focus by refining ideas and synthesizing information.


While it might appear messy and spontaneous from the outside, collaboration isn’t just a free-for-all. Collaborating in a way that surfaces wild new ideas takes intention and planning. To empower creative collaboration, we need a process that unlocks the creativity of diverse teams. Two main modes of thinking during creative collaboration—divergent and convergent thinking—are used in tandem to create and make choices. Divergence allows teams to come up with as many ideas as possible, while convergence homes in on what’s most important.

  • An Iterative Process

The creative collaboration iterative process. Narrowing down the right idea takes multiple rounds of diverging and converging. The creative collaboration iterative process. Narrowing down the right idea takes multiple rounds of diverging and converging.


While there’s a misconception that the process is linear, with ideas starting broad before getting increasingly narrow—creative collaboration includes multiple rounds of divergent and convergent thinking. In a first round your team might imagine all the possibilities of what a solution could be, before moving into what it realistically should be, what it ultimately will be, and then the actual prototype. This iterative process allows groups to combine the best elements of different options and refine them into completely new concepts by incorporating feedback and discussion.



Listen to IDEO Senior Director of Global Learning and Development and Instructor of Cultivating Creative Collaboration, Heather Currier Hunt, share her advice on embracing tension on IDEO U’s Creative Confidence Podcast.

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