A More Beautiful Question
Revisiting my notes on this book through the lens of how we think and why. What it contributes here is on divergent, creative, and combinatorial thinking
A More Beautiful Question - by Warren Berger
What I distilled relevant to my current thinking
- Divergent thinking happens in the right hemisphere of the brain. It taps into imagination and incites random association of ideas, considered a primary source of creativity. The left brain makes logical connections. The right brain makes leaps.
- Questioning is one of the most direct ways to activate the right hemisphere. Asking why does this have to be this way, or what if I tried a different approach, are intentional ways to incite divergent thinking.
- To encourage this, the aim is to quiet the logical mind. Replace can and should with how might we. Adopt a beginner's mind. Ask naïve questions even when nobody else is.
- At the core of creative thinking is combinatorial or connective thinking. Less about inventing from scratch, more about combining and recombining existing knowledge, experiences, and ideas. The further apart the ideas the more creative the result.
- To start getting ideas or answering your questions, the brain needs raw material to make unexpected connections. The broader and more varied your inputs, from knowledge sources to travel to physical activity, the more capability you are giving your mind to draw on for combinatorial thinking.
- The unconscious plays a significant role. Sleep, walking, and stepping away allow the brain to do its deepest connective work.
What I take from this is that divergent thinking requires a combination of two things. The conscious, what we deliberately do through questioning, the knowledge we seek, the education we pursue, the raw material we feed our minds. And the unconscious, which does the connective work when we step back and let it. Neither alone is sufficient. The combination of the two is what drives divergent thinking.
Quote
... if your curiosity has been focused on a particular problem, and you've been doing deep thinking, contextual inquiry, questioning the problem from various perspectives and angles, asking your multiple Whys—it all becomes fodder for later insights and smart recombinations.
(Chen-Bo Zhong, Professor, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto)
What I want to explore further
- How do we deliberately incite connective or associative thinking, other than through questioning?
- What is the relationship between the breadth of what we read, experience, and encounter and the quality of the creative connections we make?
- What does it mean in practice to deliberately expand the inputs your mind has to work with for divergent thinking?