Have you left an offsite frustrated that a lot was discussed but nothing was decided? Or, the flip-side of that, when you have ideas to contribute, but the offsite was a pretense to convince the team about something that was already decided? These are symptoms of a lack of divergent or convergent thinking. They have crucial implications for vision and strategy, and if you don’t learn how to manage it well, you end up with a bad strategy, or worse, no strategy.
Divergent and convergent thinking were coined by the psychologist J.P. Guilford in 1956. I give credit to Dan Olsen on his exceptional book, The Lean Product Playbook, to bring this to my attention. The simplest description that I come up with is:
Divergent Thinking: Generating ideas to explore many possibilities.
Convergent Thinking: Evaluating and narrowing ideas.
They have a crucial implication for strategy because a good strategy requires discovery, debate, and decision, and you can’t do these activities without both divergent and convergent thinking.
Let’s start with divergent thinking. People associated this type of thinking with “brainstorming.” It’s more than that. To grasp this concept, picture yourself exploring a long hallway in a video game, opening doors to discover what’s within. The mistake people make is to see divergent thinking as an ideation-only mechanism—how do you find solutions to a problem? That’s insufficient. You must use this approach to identify the problem, the go-to-market, the positioning, and every element that goes into a vision and strategy for a product, business, or any other innovation.
The common mistake with convergent thinking is to do it too early. To commit to a problem or to a solution without exploring the full opportunity space. That’s a common pattern, particularly when people fall in love with an idea. They put their blinders on and avoid debating if there are other areas to explore. Another common issue is to never converge, keeping the optionality doors open. Or converging and deciding to re-open doors. This is what often leads to analysis-paralysis.
Here’s what Roger Martin, author and business professor, said about the topic:
Divergence without convergence is chaos; convergence without divergence is blind.
The right combo is to be intentional about divergence and convergence. Let the team know which part of the exploration they are in and ensure they respect the boundaries of each phase. Help everyone build conviction as you move from problem to solution, and when you move from solution to distribution.
PRFAQs present an interesting tool in your arsenal to ensure you don’t miss either step. The method behind a PRFAQ forces you to ask questions about the problem space, understand its severity, importance, and urgency. Then, it forces you to discover, debate, and decide on the solution, the strategy for the solution, and how the customer will find and use that solution.