Tim Kastelle writes about the problem with solutions – essentially that they stop us from thinking. He argues for leaving problems open for longer. (I sometimes talk about the danger of “premature encapsulation” where we force meetings to conclusions too hurriedly).
He goes on to share some diagrams showing divergence and convergence and I notice I feel troubled. It’s easy to idealise a process as if everyone in the room should be on the same schedule… right now we should all be diverging; and now we should all be in the middle bit, and now let’s all converge. This feels quite uncomfortable to me and many meetings get interesting results without the need for this kind of discipline.
And who’s to say the meeting should converge at all? Sometimes schisms and disputes may prove to be a useful part of a wider creative process.
Of course, any constraint has the potential to spark creativity but I’m personally quite cautious about closing the field in these ways.
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