Use the Diverge Converge Shuffle

Slow down your steps in decision making for more impact.

Teams make decisions all of the time. Being more conscious of this, allows the team to leverage the decision to improve the outcome of the decision. There is space to make it more creative and impactful for the team and the work they’re doing together.

We all make decisions at basic and more advanced levels every day. At the basic level it will be about where to eat when meeting friends. At the more advanced might be about where to go on holiday. You could also explore career path to take. And decide whether that business idea is worth pursuing, and if so, then how to do that.

At the basic level we probably work through our steps subconsciously without much thought. As we move up the levels of complexity we start to pause and consider what we’re doing at each step. In practice, we should always pause to think of what we’re doing at each step.

This 4D process is already familiar to us as part of the design and development of software products. It also applies to smaller work too. We should more regularly pause, and use this process in our work more consciously.

If we walk through the simple process of deciding where to go for dinner with friends you can see how this works, and why we often go through steps unconsciously. We’ll also contrast this with a startup scenario to see how as the stakes go up the conscious steps come into view.

Discovery is about context of the dinner

We start with the idea that it would be good to meet for dinner. We check with friends to see if they agree, or if lunch would be better depending upon the occasion, and if anything specific is to be talked about. Here we’re framing the challenge to come.

In the business scenario the discovery phase is about determining who your customers might be, and how much demand there is for the service you envisage. You would also consider any competitors, and where you would position yourself in the market. This is setting the background and context of the service you want to offer.

Design clarifies the boundaries of your dining options

For our meal with friends we need to now agree upon date and time, as well as who should be included in the outing. We can diverge on the options of when as well as who should come, and then select the final options based upon who can make it for the meal on which date.

The business will need to explore possibilities with the business in its potential market and customers. Here it can be wild in its options, and then select the one that is the most promising, exciting, or novel.

Develop is where we create the prototype dinner solution

Now we get to the part where we decide to go for the meal. We have many options in principle, but in reality are constrained by budget, availability of seating, or reservations, as well as likes/dislikes of food by our friends, and the time available for the meal according to the type of place we choose for the meal. We can float these options to our friends until we find one that everyone agrees on for the meal. We probably rule out, based on past experience, a number of these questions as we already know the answer.

Select and arrange the components of our proposed service in different configurations to find the one that meets customer expectations best. Maybe the goal is to find the option that is most adaptable in the long term. We might also want to find the one that offers the most return soonest.

Deliver is for confirming our dinner assumptions

This is when we meet our friends and have that meal. We talk, eat, drink and find out that ‘yes, we did pick the right place’, or ‘bother, the service here is horrible. We should’ve gone to the other place’. Now we know for next time. Because, there is always ‘a next time’.

For the business, this is where the item is produced, packaged and sold. Or, the service is deployed and we’re working with our customers. Now we discover that everything is as expected, or is better/worse, than we planned. We also now find new issues, challenges and possibly opportunities, which we hadn’t thought about. This is all information, which we can use and develop for our next round of changes to our business.

We can now start the process over too. For this is never a linear process, but more like a wheel that goes round and round with multiple iterations. We learn more each time around for a specific project, but also learn more about the process too and how to better develop options for diverging to gain more options, as well as how to choose how we should converge on few, and then on one option to move forward.

Diverging and Converging with the Business Model Canvas

You might be thinking, I don’t need this, I have the Business Model Canvas to guide me. Yes, it will help you determine a good mix of components for your business model. But… it doesn’t help you work out a good way to diverge and generate more options. Nor does it help you determine the type of converging that you need at each stage.

In addition, the business model canvas doesn’t help you validate the assumptions behind your ideas. Use this process to help you prioritise the components of your business model. Find the one to focus on first to confirm that your business model is worthy of your time and energy. This process will help you validate your ideas with prototypes so that you ‘know’ you’re going in the right direction with your idea.

Teach teams how to diverge and converge for better outcomes

You can use this process to determine where to go for dinner, or you could also use it to help you with the many other decisions we make each day. The key part, as with many things, is realising that you can pause to consider options beyond the usual suspects.

In a team setting, as written about elsewhere, you don’t have to assign one person to a task. You don’t have to do your work in isolation. You can design your team experience to suit all team members.

Teach people there are options. They don’t have to follow the usual path. They should explore to find the path that’s right for them.

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