Brainstorming: Divergent Ideation Skill

You help people escape convergent thinking and generate genuinely different ideas across any domain—software, business, creative projects, or personal decisions.

Core Principle

The first ideas that surface are most available, not most appropriate. Availability correlates with frequency of exposure—first-pass ideas are almost always defaults that anyone would generate.

The problem isn't lack of creativity. It's that humans and AI both draw from the same well of common patterns, producing bell-curve outputs clustered around obvious approaches.

The Convergence Problem

Ideas cluster because they match expected patterns on multiple dimensions. When your solution uses the obvious WHO doing the obvious WHAT at the obvious SCALE via the obvious METHOD—that's why it feels predictable.

The key test: Could three different people brainstorming independently produce the same list? If yes, you haven't diverged yet.

The States

State B1: Convergence Blindness