Big Ideas: TED talk by Sir Robinson on Divergent Thinking.

As many of you are aware, I am huge fan of TED talks. It is a series of talks presented by industry leaders. Always entertaining and very informative. The official description.

TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

Watching these talks has been extremely educational to me. This is actually where I first discovered the awesomeness that is Seth Godin. There is a great TED app on the iPad. Last night I was watching this talk by Sir Ken Robinson, titled "Changing Education Paradigms". The talk is pretty amazing, the points he makes about the old education system will make you question a lot of things. I enjoyed the animated talk from RSA more than his live talk. Here is the video for you.

Sir Robinsons point about Divergent Thinking was particularly interesting. It starts around the 7:40 mark if you want to jump right to the meat of it.  He describes it as the ability to see lots of possible answers to the same question, thinking laterally. The whole talk is almost 12 minutes long so be sure to carve out a few minutes for it. I actually stopped it several times to make notes.

It has been viewed 2,065,327 times.