Executive Development

‘Two Kinds of Thinking’

 

That the human mind is a powerful, perhaps the most powerful, contributor to high performance is not a new finding. Bobby Jones, the only golfer to win the US Amateur , US Open, British Amateur, and British Open Championships all in the same year in 1930, had learned through his experiences the importance of the mind: ‘Competitive golf is played on a five-and-a-half inch course; the one between your ears’.

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Whilst Jones made his observation on the importance of the ‘mental side’ of golf in the early part of the twentieth century it was not until the middle of the century that the American psychologist, Joy Paul Guildford, through his research put forward the concept that each of us possesses one of two kinds of thinking, what he termed:  ‘convergent’ or ‘divergent’ (published in ‘The Nature of Intelligence’, 1967).

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Guildford found that when an individual was faced with a situation such as an intelligence test or a problem that favoured narrowing possibilities down to single solution this gave the ‘convergent thinker’ a distinct advantage and penalised the ‘divergent thinker’. However, if the situation or problem required flexibility, originality, a large number of ideas, or the ability to think through the details - what we may term, creativity - this greatly favoured the ‘divergent thinker’.

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Whilst creativity is associated with the highest levels of achievement in science, business, the arts, sport, as well as many other fields of life, and is presumably is valued by society, the process of ‘socialisation’ through which we all develop favours an educational system and classroom teaching where educational achievement through ‘convergent thinking’ is seemingly prized more. This may go some way to explaining why many ‘geniuses,’ who are ‘divergent thinkers’, such as Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison achieved poorly at school.

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Socialisation is a term used by psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and educationalists to describe the life-long process of inheriting and disseminating the beliefs, values, norms, and customs necessary to live and work in a society. Our life experiences and learning begins in our earliest days and leads into our first school days where we are influenced by all those with whom we closely live and raise us. This primary stage of socialisation leads to the secondary phase where we join groups, go to school, and meet other people all whom influence our socialisation – a process that continues through our life, though our primary and secondary experiences are the most influential.

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As we as adults go about our everyday life we create and tell ourself ‘stories’ that are based upon the beliefs we have learned and adopted over the years through our socialisation experiences. These can either be negative and thus prevent personal change or be positive and allow us to change and develop new skills. An individual who has developed  ‘convergent thinking’ as their preference in response to their socialisation may, for example, have a limiting number of beliefs that constrains them from seeing things from the wider perspective than that of a ‘divergent thinker’ – what many simply describe as a ‘closed’ or ‘open’ view of life.

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The beliefs we have adopted through our socialisation, many of which we may hold ‘to be the truth’ and that ‘work for us’, underpin our attitudes that are externalised through our behaviours – what is often referred to today as our ‘mindset’.

The Oxford Dictionary defines ‘mindset’ as: ‘the established set of attitudes or fixed ideas that somebody has that are often difficult to change.’ This definition well describes the ‘convergent’ or ‘closed’ mindset as well as highlights the challenge of developing ‘divergent’ thinking central to an ‘open’ mindset. The psychologist Carol Dweck in her book, ‘Mindset’ (2006), through her research and without any reference to the prior work of Guildford proposes that we possess either a ‘fixed’ or a ‘growth’ mindset.

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Changing our ‘mindset’ and moving from being a ‘convergent’ to a ‘divergent’ thinker is very achievable but it takes time, for it requires us to examine and change many of our beliefs some of which may be deep rooted but which have ‘served us well’ even though they may be ‘far from the truth’. The ‘Beliefs and Attitudes Mindset Questionnaire’ has been created to help people in this important process.