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Table 2.2 How the emphasis on thinking style changes for each step of the 2 : APPLYING CREATIVITY TO THE IDEA DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
process

Step Description Thinking style

1 Seeking and shaping Identifying and exploring Divergent and convergent
opportunities different opportunities, whole-brain thinking
followed by analytical equally dominant
judgement

2 Generating new ideas Creating significant Divergent thinking is
volumes of innovative, dominant
imaginative and
associative ideas

3 Evaluating and selecting Screening the best from Convergent thinking is
ideas the rest and then dominant
evaluating those few in
detail

4 Planning for Identifying and Divergent and convergent
implementation overcoming blocks to whole-brain thinking
implementation equally dominant

You are now aware that you must combine intuition and logic at every
step in order to be creative; the insights on whole-brain thinking should
have also made you confident that you can. So why not start improving
your skills of convergent and divergent thinking?

mastering whole-brain thinking There are three key

steps to mastering whole-brain thinking as it applies to the idea
development process:

G Identify your preferred thinking style
G Strengthen your non-preferred thinking style
G Make the most of divergent and convergent thinking phases.

We will deal with each of these in turn.

step one: identify your preferred thinking style

Complete the following exercise to test your left-brain/right-brain
dominance.35 The exercise can also be found at www.angelfire.com/wi/2
brains.