Cyber Security and the Importance of Divergent Thinking

Recently, I worked with a leading Cyber Security company for their annual L& D event. They were finding that despite all of the training the engineers and analysts were receiving, they were not addressing a lot of the concerns that were popping up and in danger of not meeting their goals. The person in charge of the event reached out to see if I could offer any insights.

This led to a customized training for his team which was all about Divergent Thinking. And there’s not better or faster way to exercise and access divergent thinking than with improv. In fact, you could say that improv is the dance between divergent and convergent thinking, over and over again. Improvisers must embrace ambiguity, let go of finding a “right” or “best” path. Instead, they learn to swim in that uncertain space — exploring and allowing their thoughts and curiosity to expand, widen out and away without concern or fear of where it will lead.

Only then, after generating a plethora of new, fresh, and off-the-beaten-path ideas, can you then begin to apply convergent thinking: narrowing down the options in order to select the one that will lead you forward. Without divergence, you get more of the same, over and over. You get the logical and known. Divergence is where creativity and novelty thrive.

It is where thinking “out of the box” lives — and where those in the ever-changing field of Cyber Security must get comfortable, staying ahead of hackers or “actors”, thinking in new ways to consider what the hackers might be thinking.

It was a fascinating training, seeing the progression of the group — from needing to figure it out immediately and come up with the one right response to allowing the space to expand beyond where they normally think. In this space, they got more and more comfortable exploring fringe ideas and radical perspectives. They generated a ton more plausible ideas which allowed them to have more robust solutions.

The person in charge said to me after the event, “I never would have imagined how applicable improv is for what we do.” It was music to my ears.