Divergent Environment Design
Change the setting to make unusual connections easier
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 97%
Qureshi observes that people often report their best ideas while walking, showering, commuting, or falling asleep, yet businesses ask for creativity around a boardroom table. Instead of immediately training people to be innovative, first examine whether the environment permits exploration and expression. Ask team members where ideas naturally occur, reproduce useful qualities such as movement, lower evaluation pressure, or varied stimuli, and invite connections between things that are not normally paired. Keep generation divergent long enough to avoid collapsing into familiar answers, then switch deliberately to convergent evaluation and testing. The method does not require copying anyone's private setting; it translates the conditions behind informal creativity into a safe working environment.
Origin
Extracted from The Diary of a CEO
Core principles
- 01Creative ideas often arise outside formal idea rooms
- 02Environment can constrain or enable expression
- 03Divergent thinking connects previously separate things
- 04Training people is not always the first intervention
How to run it
- 1
Find natural idea settings
Ask people where and when ideas tend to occur for them outside formal brainstorming.
Pro tip Look for shared conditions, not one universal location.
- 2
Audit the formal room
Identify cues that force immediate correctness, hierarchy, or familiar connections.
Watch out Do not blame individuals for an environment that punishes exploration.
- 3
Recreate enabling conditions
Design a safe setting with movement, varied stimuli, autonomy, or reduced evaluation pressure where appropriate.
Pro tip A walking discussion may be enough.
Watch out Respect privacy, accessibility, and professional boundaries.
- 4
Invite odd connections
Use prompts that connect normally separate concepts and allow apparently strange answers to remain visible.
Pro tip Separate idea generation from critique.
- 5
Converge and test
After generating possibilities, evaluate them against real constraints and select a bounded experiment.
Pro tip State when the session changes from divergent to convergent mode.
Watch out Novelty alone is not value.
In the wild
Qureshi says people commonly name walks, showers, commutes, or the edge of sleep as sources of ideas, not a boardroom with mints and water. He argues that organisations should create more natural conditions for people to flourish.
→ The team redesigns the conditions for ideation before assuming its people lack creativity.
Common mistakes
Training before fixing context
Teaching innovation techniques may not help if hierarchy or the room itself suppresses unusual ideas.
Never switching to evaluation
Divergence creates possibilities, but a later convergent stage is needed to choose and test them.
Is it for you?
Best for
It is best for teams needing new possibilities before evaluating and executing them.
Not ideal for
It is not ideal during emergencies or decisions that require immediate precision and controlled execution.
From the transcript
“you're too quick to train the people rather than fix the environment”
“people who are making a connection between two things previously unconnected”
From the episode
World Leading Psychologist: How to Succeed in Life & Work - Jamil Qureshi