Have you ever been in a meeting that felt mired in process, where trying to come up with the perfect decision for everyone left you at a standstill?
Now consider: have you been in a meeting where it felt like the rush to reach agreement cut off space for any authentic difference of opinions?
My guess is that most of us have experienced both of these types of meetings many times. They are common traps in the complexity of humans trying to work together, address conflict, collaborate. These scenarios are two sides of the same coin: examples of how divergent and convergent thinking both need their due – and what happens when they are out of balance.
Divergent thinking is like a funnel starting from a narrow place (your topic, challenge, or question to consider) and widening out. It is the kind of thinking that helps us imagine possibilities beyond the obvious and generate creative ideas. Done well, divergence fills in the gaps of our blind spots and challenges our well-worn patterns of thinking and being. Conversely, convergent thinking is like flipping the funnel so that it takes you from the wide expanse of possibilities to a narrow place of agreement. Convergence is not finding one thing that encompasses all the things; we rarely have such elegant solutions nor is that the goal. Convergence, at its best, meaningfully considers a range of ideas, including conflicting ones, to help a group reach agreement - sometimes landing on one person’s initial idea, sometimes a hybrid of several ideas, and sometimes a new idea that arises out of the multiplicity.
It's not uncommon to find ourselves in the extremes of our opening examples. When we linger too long in divergence, we’re often waiting for some clear moment of alignment that never comes. Disagreement leaves us feeling stuck and unsure of how to proceed. When we rush to convergence, it’s often from that same desire for everything to click into place that pushes us toward a false sense of harmony. We may lean heavily on groupthink and settle on conventional wisdom. In some cases, this is satisfying enough – not all decisions require the same investment of time and effort. But, for decisions that significantly impact people’s lives and/or work, it is critical to allow divergence and convergence to each run their course.
One visual that may help us do this is “The Diamond of Participatory Decision-Making” from facilitator, Sam Kaner, author of Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making, which you can view here (scroll down until you see a diamond shape).
Kaner shows us the “business as usual” tendency to review easy, on-the-surface options and then quickly try to tie it up with a decision. But complex problems resist that obvious solution and leave us with questions and unease. If we press past that temptation, we can enter the divergent zone and elicit what might seem like “out there” or controversial opinions, but which foster a spirit of curiosity and aliveness. And while we may wish that this led seamlessly into convergence, Kaner highlights a normal part of the process: the “Groan Zone.” He writes: “A period of confusion and frustration is a natural part of group decision-making. Once a group crosses the line from airing familiar opinions to exploring diverse perspectives, group members have to struggle in order to integrate new and different ways of thinking with their own.” If you can stay in the discomfort of the Groan Zone and not attempt to skip over it, the group will find its way to convergence where deeper understanding starts to lead way to synthesis and, eventually, a decision point.
There are plenty of tips and tools for each part of this process, many included in Kaner’s book, as well as one of my favorite resources, Liberating Structures, which are simple exercises for gathering, reflecting, and collaborating in inclusive and meaningful ways. The hardest part, I find, is building the muscle to be in the Groan Zone and trust that you’ll make your way through. I can think of a number of times as a facilitator where a group seemed to lose steam and I noticed people becoming aggravated or skeptical. Some of those times, I saw this as a fault in the process and so I sprang to a neat conclusion; while those moments temporarily released the pressure, they always left me disappointed and incomplete. I can also think of a number of times as a participant in a meeting where I felt this frustration and found myself checking out.
Individual humans working as a collective is messy – there’s no way around that. And still, it can be deeply uncomfortable to accept this messiness as an indication of doing something right as opposed to doing something wrong. Kaner’s appeal to facilitators, I think, holds true whether you are leading a group or participating in one, whether you are making a strategic-decision with coworkers or wading through a complicated issue with friends and family. He writes, “The facilitator’s tenacity is grounded in […] a faith that the wisdom to solve the problems at hand will emerge from the group, as long as people don’t give up trying.” It is a lesson I can’t learn too many times and I hope it serves you well in whatever ways you find yourselves in the vital, clumsy work of acting with others.