by Has your marketing become boring and repetitive? Does your team hold back on suggesting innovative ideas because they’re afraid of rejection or humiliation?
In this article, you'll discover a framework for cultivating content creativity by separating your ideation process into two distinct phases: divergent and convergent thinking.
Why Most Businesses Struggle With Creative Content Development
No one wakes up and says, “I’m excited to create mediocre content today!” So, why are so many of us trapped in a cycle of doing what we’ve always done?
The way creativity operates is almost the exact opposite of how most businesses are forced to operate. Most businesses focus on maximum output at maximum speed with maximum efficiency and very little risk tolerance. They need to get it right, hit their goals, and deliver results consistently.
Creativity, by contrast, requires taking risks. Good ideas need time to develop. People must feel comfortable and safe to take those kinds of risks without fear of getting fired or missing their goals. It's really difficult to prioritize creativity in those situations because the environment simply doesn't allow for it.
Humans naturally fall into habits and routines, doing the same stuff over and over because it's convenient and they've done it before. Marketing studies show year after year that most teams wish they had more resources, more time, and more people than they currently have. These constraints compound the challenge.
Creating a process for ideating and refining creative content will help you break out of the mediocre content cycle.
#1: How to Encourage Creative Content Ideation: Use Divergent and Convergent Thinking
Creative thinking isn't one thing—it's actually two things working together: divergent thinking and convergent thinking.
Understanding the distinct roles of divergent and convergent thinking is crucial for generating innovative content ideas while still producing work you can actually execute.
Divergent thinking is the big idea thinking–what you might think of as brainstorming. You're expanding possibilities and generating options without constraint.
You're exploring what conditions you could create to capture cool content and allow ideas to surface, no matter how unrealistic they might initially seem.
In the divergent phase, you're responding to ideas with “tell me more,” “what else could we do like that,” and “give me more.” You're leading with curiosity without applying constraints.
Convergent thinking is when you bring reality back into the room. You're converging—coming back together. You're bringing budget, timeline, legal approval, and all those practical considerations back in to see what kind of pruning you need to do on your pile of ideas to end up with something you can truly use.
This is when people come in and ask, “Now, how do we make that reasonable? How do we make that achievable? How do we build on that into something that might be more reasonable?”
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GET THE DETAILSIn the convergent phase, you're evaluating what you have, plucking out the gems, and trying to make the best doable version of those ideas. Maybe a full-length feature documentary for Q2 becomes a two-minute mini-documentary that's within budget and fits your production team's shoot schedule.
You're finding the realistic version of whatever the big idea was that's doable within your budget, timeline, and resources.
The sequence of these two types of thinking matters, and divergent thinking has to come first.
If you bring budget and reality into the room too early, you're starting to shut people off and make them less likely to share.
You’ll end up staying exactly where you are, doing more of what you've always done.
Case Study: Divergent and Convergent Thinking in Action
When Melanie Deziel worked with an industrial safety equipment company.
This company creates latches, guards, locks, and other equipment that prevent machinery from doing things it's not supposed to do and protect workers from injury in industrial environments. It's very much an industrial B2B business—not direct-to-consumer, not conventionally fun.
One team member mentioned, “Well, we actually have beehives on our campus. Maybe we could do something fun around the bees, working together, and how that relates to our teamwork.”
Instead of cutting off this idea as irrelevant or off-brand, the team responded with curious and yes-and thinking: “Cool. Yes. Tell me more. What else could we do like that? Are there other animals we could take inspiration from that are somehow relevant? Who are some of our clients? Do they have animals?”
As they continued building, somebody on the team suggested, “We should get a Highland cow.”
The idea was that maybe as a company, they could adopt a Highland cow. It could live on their campus. They could create content about the cow because they speak to farmers who work in agricultural and industrial settings.
At this point, most people listening to this story think, “That's not a good idea” or “That's a horrible idea.” But that's not the point of the divergent phase.
This is when the team switched to convergent thinking. They brought reality, budget, timeline, legal approval—all those things—back into the room to see what kind of pruning they needed to do to end up with something they could truly use.
In this case, the Highland cow didn't work. They weren't zoned for cows on their campus, but they were allowed to keep chickens, and they sell equipment to protect chicken coops.
In the area where they already had beehives working and making honey, they added chickens. Now they had eggs as well.
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By following the path from divergent to convergent thinking, they were able to create a reasonable version of the cow idea they could execute on—something within their budget, timeline, and resources.
Here's what makes this example so powerful: if they had not gone beyond the bees, they would never have gotten to the cow. If they had not gotten to Highland Cow, they would not ultimately have refined to chickens.
By allowing that growth phase—by not cutting off ideas when they seemed unrealistic—they were able to surface a final solution that was both creative and executable.
#2: How to Create a Culture that Supports Creative Content Ideation
When creativity isn't happening on your team, the instinct is often to blame the people involved. They're not creative enough. They're not trying hard enough. They have a limited mindset. They're not cut out for creative work.
This approach is fundamentally wrong and counterproductive. The problem is never the people—it's the process and conditions you've created.
Nobody wakes up wanting to create bad, mediocre work. That's just basic human fulfillment. People want to do good work. They want to contribute meaningfully and feel proud of what they produce.
When someone appears to have a limited mindset or seems afraid to take creative risks, they haven't always been that way. Someone with that mindset has been punished in the past for taking risks. They've been embarrassed in front of their peers. They've learned through experience that suggesting unconventional ideas leads to negative consequences.
What you're seeing isn't a personality flaw or lack of creativity—it's a rational response to an environment that doesn't support creative risk-taking.
If your culture creates an environment where people feel afraid to take creative risks, you can lecture them all day long about being more creative. You could put them on personal improvement plans or even let them go. But if the culture creates that feeling, the next person sitting in that seat will feel the same way.
The environment is the problem, not the individual. Change the conditions, and you'll see different results from the same people.
Ask the Right Questions: Look to Process, Not People
When creativity isn't thriving, ask yourself what about your process makes people feel unsafe to take risks. Don't ask what's wrong with the person. Ask what's wrong with the process.
As a leader or colleague, examine your own behavior. Do you defend team members when someone cuts their ideas down? Do you create a safe space for people to share without immediate judgment? Do you separate divergent and convergent thinking phases, or do you mix them together in ways that shut down creativity?
Look at your team's operating procedures. Is there time allocated for exploration and experimentation, or is everything focused on immediate execution? Are failures treated as learning opportunities or as career setbacks? Do you celebrate creative attempts even when they don't work out?
Making the Shift
Creating conditions where creativity thrives requires intentional choices. You have to actively protect creative time and space. You have to defend ideas during their vulnerable early stages. You have to separate exploration from evaluation so people feel safe to suggest unconventional approaches.
These changes don't happen accidentally. You have to implement them with intention and maintain them consistently. But when you do, you'll see the same team members who seemed uncreative suddenly contributing innovative ideas and taking the kinds of risks that lead to breakthrough work.
You, as a leader or individual team member, can make subtle changes—like separating divergent and convergent thinking and avoiding blaming the process instead of people—that create conditions where creativity thrives.
Melanie Deziel is a creative systems architect who helps marketers and individuals create better content through content operations. She's the author of multiple books, including Prove It and The Content Fuel Framework. Explore her Creative Side Quest Snail Mail Club for creative prompts once a month. Follow here on TikTok and LinkedIn.
Other Notes From This Episode
- Connect with Michael Stelzner @Stelzner on Instagram and @Mike_Stelzner on X.
- Watch this interview and other exclusive content from Social Media Examiner on YouTube.
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