Week of 2022-10-31
Where I try to point out a qualitative distinction between divergent and convergent processes, and just can’t stop talking about dandelions and elephants.
Convergent innovation
As a sort of thought appetizer, here’s a vignette attempting to intersect the divergent/convergent thinking frame and … you guessed it, dandelions and elephants.
While exploring idea generation strategies, I realized that I’ve confused the opposite of divergent thinking with the lack of new ideas. That does not seem to be the case. There is a really simple 2x2 that helps illustrate that. Horizontally, we have dandelions and elephants, and vertically – the rate of new ideas that we want to encourage. Some organizations, for example, don’t want any new ideas altogether (low rate), while others have an existential need for new ideas (high rate).
The upper quadrants make sense: we have our dandelion-fueled exploration and improvements to existing ideas through the elephant strategy. The bottom-right quadrant shows up as orthodoxy – when new ideas are unwanted because we believe that there’s already one idea that is understood as well as it could be. The final, bottom-left quadrant is that of the idea desert: the absence of ideas altogether. This quadrant rarely has permanent occupants, because we humans tend to have ideas – however, we might occasionally visit it when we’re lost and disoriented.
If I were to explore how an organization might move from quadrant to quadrant, there appear to be four clockwise motions, from one quadrant to another. When our process of ⛵exploration (the top-left quadrant) yields many interesting ideas, organizations tend to shift into the convergent posture: start looking for one idea that will become bigger than others. A typical call here is “more wood behind fewer arrows” and conversations about prioritization and hard decisions. Convergence leads to the top-right quadrant of 📈 improvements, where most of our efforts are invested into reinforcing the idea.
Thinking in this quadrant does not need to be boring and uncreative. For example, one of my colleagues, upon joining our team, spent a bunch of time looking through the code and spotted a bug: in handling mouse events, we would sometimes hit an O(n2) condition – and that was unnecessary. Their first commit to the codebase was a performance breakthrough. When I think of innovation in the top-right quadrant, I keep recalling that bit of code. It was clearly a novel insight, yet it also demonstrably improved the state of the bigger idea.
Unfortunately, our residence in this quadrant usually comes to an end due to the consolidation move. In an effort to better protect the value contained within the big idea, organizations usually shift to the quadrant of ☝️orthodoxy, where any new ideas are viewed as mostly distractions. There’s so much stuff to do already! The problem lists are long and the issues are well-known. Let’s just keep on fixing them, shall we?
As you may suspect from the flow of this story, the discouraging of new ideas eventually triggers the next move: obsolescence. This move puts us into the 🏜 idea desert. We know that the old big idea no longer works, but we have nothing else to hang onto. The discomfort of this quadrant acts a powerful motivator, manifesting as the divergence move that propels us back into the ⛵exploration quadrant. This move might coincide with the demise of the organization, when the divergence acts as a pulling-apart force of ideas, each stakeholder pursuing their own.
If we are to believe this tall tale, we can see that divergence and convergence are somewhat orthogonal moves. The divergence is mostly about moving from zero to many ideas while relying on dandelion strategies.
On the other hand, the convergence is a qualitative shift. It does not change how much idea-generation we do, but rather whether or not these ideas are independent from each other. A productive convergence is the one where people ideate while building on each other’s ideas, improving upon one unifying big idea – the elephant strategy.
This might not be news to you at all, but this was a pretty useful insight for me. When planning the next diverge/converge exercise:
To get divergence truly going, put people in the idea desert. Let them have the sense that all of their previous, strongly-held beliefs might not be as sound and safe as they seem. This might mean not letting people prepare for the exercise or even creating an idea parking lot that is filled at the beginning with the ideas that we already have.
Recognize the creative part of convergent thinking. Let people continue ideate, but shift the constraints of the exercise to encourage the clumping of ideas together. Avoid prematurely collapsing the process straight toward the orthodoxy.
Convergence doesn’t have to be a boring prioritize-and-cut procedure. It can be fun – and who knows, maybe produce new ideas that didn’t pop up during the divergence part of the exercise?
🔗 https://glazkov.com/2022/11/02/convergent-innovation/
Generating ideas and strategy coherence
I’ve been talking about dandelions and elephants for a while now, and yes, it may seem like I’ve gone a bit nuts. Oh well. It’s just that it’s such a good framing and I keep finding uses for it nearly every day. When applied to ideas, r/K-selection strategies seem to be uncommonly generative.
It all begins with a question: what kind of new ideas do we want to produce? Do we want a collection of different, independent ideas or do we want each idea to improve upon some larger idea?
What I like about these questions is that they are objective-agnostic. They don’t ask “what do you want to achieve?” or “where do you want to go?” Instead, they require us to choose the means to generate ideas. And strategy is all about the means. In the field where I work, strategy is also about generating new ideas.
Here’s the thing. In software engineering (as likely in many technology fields), more often than not, we don’t know what the path to our objective will look like. Heck, most of the time we don’t even have a clear sense of what the objective will look like. This is assuredly not a “let’s plan all steps in advance” process. The fog of uncertainty is right there in front of us.
If we are to navigate toward it, we must be prepared to shift course, to adjust, to learn on the spot about the next step, make it, learn again, and so on. And to do this well, we need new ideas. Our strategy must count on us continuously producing these new ideas – and applying them. In this way, my ramblings about dandelions and elephants aren’t fun side metaphors. They are the essence of business.
Summoning my inner Rumelt and putting things perhaps overly bluntly, an organization can only be effective at setting a strategy and actually following through when it is intentional about creating conditions for generating ideas. While it’s not the only crucial ingredient, the organization that doesn’t have it will suffer from strategic incoherence.
A team may accept as a truism that bottom-up cultures are superior to top-down cultures. And yes, if we are setting out to explore a large space of unknown untapped potential, then we probably want to create conditions for a dandelion strategy. The bottom-up culture has them: individual incentives (Interest), small teams, short-term objectives (Legibility), independent decision-making (Velocity) and non-hierarchical structure and mobility (Access).
However, when we’re endeavoring to care for one big idea, we likely want the conditions to encourage the elephant strategy: more structured and predictable organization and incentives (Stability), care and accountability in decision-making (Breadth), comprehensive processes and long-term thinking (Rigor), and concentrated points of organizational control (Power). These are a depiction of the top-down culture.
If we set out to do something that calls for an elephant strategy, yet the culture we have is a bottom-up one, we will have strategically incoherent outcomes (I called them the “pappus elephants” in the previous post). Our bottom-up culture will suddenly snag us like a trap, with coordination headwinds becoming universally felt and recognized. Things that worked really well for us before, like emphasizing individual impact in our incentive structures, will become a source of pain: why are our teammates acting in such a self-interested way?! Well… maybe because that was a good thing when we needed a dandelion strategy?
Even when the need to pursue a multi-year objective becomes existential, the dandelion conditions will keep blowing us off course: multi-year ideas will be simply swept away by the churn of the quarterly objective-setting and obsessive focus on individual impact. In a dandelion culture, when given a chance to make a dandelion move, most folks will take it. When strategy is incoherent, one can be a superstar while directly contributing to the team's demise.
Perhaps even more bizarrely, by all accounts of witnesses, these efforts will look like elephants – until they disappear in a puff. It is in everyone’s interest to create a perception that they are indeed operating in an elephant factory, despite all the dandelion moves they are making.
When caught in this condition inconsistency, the long-term projects within this organization will inevitably find themselves in a weird cycle: set out to do big things, fail to articulate them clearly, struggle to do something very ambitious, get distracted, then quietly discontinue the effort, unable to examine what happened due to the deep sense of shame that follows – only to try again soon thereafter. When underlying conditions allow only dandelion-like moves, trying to choose an elephant strategy is a tough proposition.
The variables and symptoms might vary, but the equation will remain the same. If they sound at all familiar, consider asking different questions to get to a more productive conversation about incentives, culture, structure, and practices. What are our current conditions for generating new ideas? Do they lean dandelion or elephant? How might they be inconsistent with our desired outcomes?