With the rise of remote work and the benefits of teams and organizations becoming increasingly agile, purposeful leadership of teams is becoming increasingly more important. Teams and organizations must respond to both the challenges and opportunities of the moment and the future. Purposeful collaboration that both respects the time and talents of individuals and brings individuals together in productive ways is essential. The intentional application of the concepts of divergence and convergence makes teams and organizations more creative, innovative, and productive.

Divergence & Convergence

Divergence is simply the act of separating. In psychology, divergence can refer to the process of thinking differently from others, or exploring new ideas that are not necessarily aligned with conventional wisdom. Divergent thinking is the process of creating multiple unique ideas or solutions to a challenge or problem. Divergence allows individuals to ideate, research, design, and prototype on their own. The individual time allows people time to process things individually, in their own way, in their own space.

Convergence is simply the act of coming together. In psychology convergence is the process of aligning thoughts with those of others. Convergent thinking focuses on reaching a common solution or idea to a challenge or problem. Convergence allows individuals to come together to gain multiple insights from a diverse group. When a group is working well together, they can gain momentum and feel a strong sense of teamwork and camaraderie.

Both divergence and convergence have important roles to play in team and organization dynamics, creativity, innovation, and productivity.

How They Manifest

An over abundance of either divergence or convergence does not lead to good outcomes. Too much divergence can lead to a scattershot of solutions, most of them not being well-vetted, with little support from the team or organization. Too much convergence can lead to group-think, with what is often a watered-down solution being applied. As teams become more remote, it’s easy to rely on divergence.

It’s easy to rely on divergence when you have an all-star problem solver on your team or in your organization. Their ideas typically bubble to the top, leading others to feel ignored. To combat this, many teams and organizations force convergent thinking, with the hope that the group will be able to establish the best solution or idea together. The solutions that come out of forced convergence are typically incomplete and even inadequate.

On the other hand, divergence and convergence can be intentionally leveraged to design outstanding solutions and ideas. By blending both working and thinking patterns into a cohesive approach, teams and organizations allow for individual thought and work, while bringing the team together to create and design the solutions that your team and organization need.

Purposeful Divergence & Convergence in Action

The dynamics that divergence and convergence create by designing processes that allow them to work together are powerful. These dynamics also lead to better outcomes, especially when the work is well aligned. This takes intentional leadership and effort.

When a team is brought together, the individuals in the team typically represent various strengths, and may represent various parts of your organization. To truly take advantage of each individual’s strengths, as well as the team’s collective ability, you have to allow for both divergence and convergence.

Whether you’re working in a design sprint to design a prototype, or working on a larger project with a larger team that requires a bigger investment of time and effort applying divergence & convergence is powerful.

Let’s examine the example of a design sprint. Design sprint teams are typically smaller and agile. Exercises are usually designed as “note and vote” exercises. This allows individuals to diverge and think on their own, and then come back together as a group to discuss the various ideas – seeing where they intersect, seeing where they diverge, and finally coming to a solution or answer. This application of divergence and convergence allows for both individual processing and thought, and for team problem solving. It leads to more creative solutions, and the time constraint allows the group to move productively through the design process.

When the project is larger, with the teams and the projects being much larger in scale, the same application of divergence and convergence still applies. Creative and innovative answers and solutions to large challenges with large teams require high levels problem-solving and collaboration. Allowing for both individual processing, research, prototyping, and ideation, and team problem solving dynamics, will lead to more creative, and innovative solutions, while remaining productive.

Fostering Creativity and Innovation

Creativity is the ability to generate new thoughts, ideas, and processes. It involves using imagination, originality, and resourcefulness. It also involves time to create connections between things that may seem disparate. Much of this work may require time alone in thought and research. Some of it will require learning from others in the group.

An innovation is an outcome of creativity. An innovation is application of creativity and problem solving to develop and implement new products and processes that are both incremental improvements and radical breakthroughs. Innovation is a key driver for economic growth and plays a critical role in an organization’s competitiveness and growth. In order to design and implement innovations, teams and organizations must invest in creativity.

By designing processes that allow individuals to work and think on their own in divergence, and empower the team to come back together to discuss, learn, and make progress in convergence, individuals both influence and are influenced by the team or organization. Together, individual ideation and group collaboration allow for individual and group creativity and leads to organizational innovation.

Divergence and Convergence as a Pattern for Growth

Processes must account for both divergence and convergence to foster both creativity and innovation. This leads to organizational competitiveness in the market and growth. The pattern of divergence and convergence will repeat itself throughout the lifecycle of an individual design sprint or project. There will be times of both divergence and convergence. This pattern should also repeat itself throughout your organization, across design sprints and projects.

By purposefully allowing for both divergence and convergence, they can be leveraged to produce fantastic outcomes.