Lesson 5: Ways to Generate More Alternatives:

By: Therese Ong

Fluency refers to the number of ideas or produced in a given length of time.

Flexibility refers to the diversity of ideas or concepts generated.

The following techniques will help you improve your ability to generate alternatives when faced with problems:

• Defer judgment
• Expand current alternatives
• Combine unrelated attributes

Defer Judgment

A technique called brainstorming was dveeloped by Osborn (1993). Brainstorming is a very powerful tool that help people make quick judgments about each piece of information.

There are four basic rules in brainstorming. These are intended to reduce social inhibitions among group members, stimulate idea generation, and increase overall creativity of the group.

1. Focus on quantity
2. Withhold criticism
3. Welcome unusual ideas
4. Combine and improve ideas

Expand Current Alternatives

Subdivision is one technique for expanding alternatives that involves dividing a problem into smaller parts. The mode of subdivision has an influence on the extent to which planning can proceed simultaneously on the several aspects of the problem. The more uses you identify, the greater your fluency in thinking. The more variety there is in your list, the greater is your flexibility in thinking too.

Combine Unrelated Attributes

Morphological synthesis is a four step procedure with firstly writing down the problem, then second, the attributes if the problem are listen. Third, alternatives to each attribute are listed. And lastly, different alternatives from the attributes list are combine.