How To Combine Thinking Styles for Enhanced Creativity

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We have all been there: trying to come up with our next venture or find a solution to a business or career problem in a unique way and not getting there at all, either because we are too spacey and have way too many ideas or because we are too restrictive and can’t see the options around us.

Whether you are conscious of this or not, creative problem-solving uses two primary tools to find solutions: divergent and convergent thinking. (Both terms coined by the American psychologist J.P. Guilford in 1956.)

Divergence generates ideas in response to a problem, while convergence narrows them down to a shortlist until you find the right one. The most creative people are able to balance both.

John Chamberlain was a master at divergent and convergent thinking. The man was credited with translating Abstract Expressionism into three dimensions and almost single-handedly gave automotive metal a place in the history of sculpture while smashing, slicing, welding, and twisting together a poetic fusion from fenders, fins, bumpers and hoods.

Divergent thinking increases flexibility in how you approach problems. This is when you look at the situation from many different angles. For example, an expansive out-of-the-box brainstorming session with yourself where your thought process is unlimited and filled with trial and error and experimentation.

By the time he was 30, Chamberlain had already done all sorts of things: he attempted to be a draftsman, dropped out from the Art Institute of Chicago, and even tried his luck as a hairdresser and makeup artist until finally attending Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1955. Here he surrounded himself with other artists and poets who opened his mind to think divergently about the many different paths he could pursue.

In the summer of 1957, Chamberlain discovered that scrap metal could be used as a material for sculpture. He found a 1929 Ford Pie Wagon in the backyard of his friend Larry River's house in Southampton, New York. He was inspired to pull off the fenders and drive over them with his car, then twist and weld the metal together with steel rods, which gave birth to his sculpture Shortstop, and with it completely reinvented modeling, casting, and volume. This altered Marcel Duchamp's notion of the readymade and use of the car as both medium and tool.

This moment marked the beginning of Chamberlain’s long engagement with making sculpture from recycled automobile parts - works that defied traditional definitions of what sculpture should be. And he didn’t have to spend crazy money or find a pool of investors. “It was like, God, I finally found an art supply, and it was so cheap it just made you laugh,” he said.

Divergent thinking is like the open part of a funnel, ready to take on anything you want to throw in there.

The convergent mind is more like that of an engineer who needs to arrange the pieces of a device in a way that makes it work most efficiently. Or that of an editor who clears the clutter and leaves only the best parts.

Music producer Rick Rubin has his own take on convergent thinking as he wrote in his book The Creative Act: A Way of Being: “You may be drawn to different rhythms, colors, and patterns, though they might not live together harmoniously. The pieces must fit together in the container. The container is the organizing principle of the work. It dictates which elements do and don't belong. The same furniture that suits a palace may not make sense in a monastery…Talented artists who are unskilled editors can do subpar work and fail to live up to their gift's promise.”

One of Chamberlain’s crucial tenets and artistic ethos was “it’s all in the fit”; meaning the way in which he made the metal parts come together for the final sculpture. Combinations of shape and color coupled with metal-dripping, spraying, patterning, and sandblasting to produce radical visual effects - this was his idea of a fit.

This is where convergent thinking showed up in Chamberlain’s practice: "If I have a room full of parts, they are like a lot of words, and I have to take one piece and put it next to another and find out if it really fits. The poet's influence is there, plus in my titles."

Convergent thinking helps narrow problems down into smaller, more manageable chunks, which in Chamberlain’s case was how he assembled all the available pieces in each one of his sculptures.

People tend to fall more on one side or the other of these two thinking styles. Most humans are capable of balancing both.

At the beginning of that quest for whatever it is that you want to do next or the problem you need to solve, it’s always best to start with divergent thinking, adopting as many perspectives and switchable directions as possible.

Then continue with an in-depth analysis of the pros and cons of each option. If you can write them down on side-by-side lists, more power to you. This is convergent thinking, the more logical reasoning of making a choice among many options. Bonus points if you can put a deadline for this last part so you aren’t forever stuck in a limbo of ideas and can move swiftly into execution.

This process is applicable to anything. Branching out further in the late 1960s, Chamberlain produced films such as The Secret Life of Hernando Cortez. He and the director Michel Auder explained: “The job of the director, like the job of a sculptor, is first to see the pieces, then to put them together. He isn't going to take each piece and twist it, bend it, direct it, before he adds it to the ensemble; he's going to choose each piece because he knows in advance it will fit.”

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