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The ability to navigating a middle road of divergence and convergence Is increasingly essential these days. It’s a key “and” we have to master (see: Mastering the Challenge of the “and”) in the face of the changing nature of change (see: Change Has Changed).

It’s about our thinking, questions, decision and actions (see Strate’gems article: Executive Intelligence, Intuition & Resilience ). Divergence is about divergent avenues of thinking, questions, decision and actions. Within that divergence, convergence is about a convergent coming together of our thinking, questions, decisions and actions, towards achieving our goals. Divergence is inclusive of other familiar terms, such as brain-storming, green-light thinking and creative thinking, but there is more to it than that. Convergence includes goal-orientation, attention-to-detail and driving things to completion, but there is more to it than that.

In his 2001 book, Reframing Business, Richard Normann, puts it well, saying:

“Every true renewal process takes place in stages (not necessarily sequential but often better described as modes of thinking and acting) characterized by the generation of new diversity and information, and then stages of reduction of it and focus on certain types of action. A successful organization must learn to live in both these modes. We must open up, relative to where we are now, but at some stage we also need to close in and focus and make choices. Business and other Institutions today have to be very skilled at conceptualizing. Today’s free flow of information needs to be transformed into unique concepts and frameworks which then focalize action. Action orientation and conceptual thinking are two sides of the same coin. One of the most common errors– I am tempted to say tragedies – I see in business and other organizations is giving in to the pressure of premature closure. If you have not opened up first, there is very little to close in on to. If choice has not been preceded by enough generation of diversity to create many options, and with generation of real tension with the present, it is a pseudo-exercise, a ritual of little consequence. We will be faced with an organization which has not realized its opportunities.”

Conceptualizing and focalizing our thinking, questions, decisions and actions. That takes a certain executive intelligence, intuition and resilience as outlined in the Strate’gems article I referenced above: Executive Intelligence, Intuition & Resilience . Many people get overwhelmed by this with the resulting tragedy Richard Normann speaks about.

A famous tragedy which illustrates this point is that of Eastern Airlines Flight 401 on Dec 29th 1972, which I came across in James Murphy’s year 2000 book, “Business is Combat – a fighter pilot’s guide to winning in modern business warfare”, in which he recounts the story as follows:

“En-route to Miami, on ten-mile final approach to Miami International Airport, 2000 feet above sea level, and on a normal descent for landing. It was a dark night, but perfectly clear, with no weather problems whatsoever. The first officer, who was at the controls, turned to the captain and said, “Gear down, before landing checklist”. Standard procedure: the first officer was calling for the landing gear and then the check-list. The captain threw the gear handle down and then waited for the three green lights to come on the panel indicating that the nose gear and the two main gears were down and locked. There was a pause, as there always is, as the gear traveled down. The crew waited for the three greens. But they didn’t get them. Only two greens came on. The left and right main gear lights were on, but the nose gear light was not illuminated. This appeared to mean that the nose gear had not come down, but that was such an unusual thing that the crew had to consider other problems too - could it be a bad light bulb? A bad relay? Or had the nose gear really failed? The captain pulled out the emergency landing gear checklist, which told him to cycle the gear handle again. He did so. Still two greens. The captain then said, “its probably a burned out light bulb. Let’s test it.” So the first officer pushed it in to reseat it, but no luck; it still failed to illuminate. So they reasoned that they had a bad bulb. The captain then said to the first officer, “put this damn thing on autopilot and let’s figure out why this light won’t go on”. All three men put their heads into fixing the light bulb.”

“It is important to make note of the autopilot. Probably 90 percent of commercial flights are on autopilot at 2000 feet. But when a plane is on autopilot, it is still the flying pilot’s responsibility to monitor the status of the aircraft continually. In this case, the flying pilot was the first officer, who sat in the right seat. Then the fatal problem crept up. As the first officer leaned forward to help pry the bulb from its mount, he exerted a small pressure on the yoke. The L1011 autopilot is designed so that when a push or pull force greater than a few pounds is exerted against the control wheel, the aircraft says to itself, “hey, I think the pilots want to fly the airplane.” Click, the autopilot disengaged. When it did, the L1011 began a gentle, slow decent, imperceptible to anyone, free-flying toward the marshes below.At night over water with a dark sky, the sky and the water tend to blend together to disguise the horizon. No one in the cabin had a clue that the plane was descending. And the pilots, focused on the little bulb, were channelized to the max. As they flew through 1500 feet, the air traffic controller, who probably noticed the unusual descent, came on the radio saying, “Eastern 401, how are things going out there?”. But Eastern 401 was so channelized that, while they heard the radio call, they didn’t really listen to it. They answered perfunctorily, “uh, roger, Eastern 401” and clicked off the mike. The controller, for some reason assured by this answer, shifted his attention to other traffic. Seconds went by”.

“With just 120 feet above ground showing on the altimeter, the first officer finally came up for air. He looked at the altimeter and didn’t believe what he was seeing. One hundred twenty feet! He was supposed to be at 2000 feet. The first officer asked, “we’re at 2000 feet right?” A few precious seconds were lost as his cognitive functions spun back into gear. Perhaps the first officer was trying to reconcile what the altimeter said and what he believed should be true – the airplane was at 2000 feet. For the next 12 seconds, no one reacted to the altimeter. Could the aircraft have been saved at this point? The experts think so. Push the throttles up, pull back on the control wheel, and fly to safety. But the correction had to be made immediately. The National Traffic Safety Board re-creation of the crash shows that the Eastern 401 crew did not react immediately. Why? The cockpit voice recorder reveals that the crew spent the next 12 seconds – the rest of their lives – trying to figure out what had happened instead of reacting to what was happening in the very urgent present. Down they went, the altimeter reading out the fatal numbers: 100 feet … 50 feet … 20 feet … boom. 90 people died because 3 experienced professional pilots forgot to fly the plane while they became channelized on a 20 cent light bulb.

As James Murphy explains elsewhere in his book, “channelized” is a term used to describe the danger of becoming overly convergent, kind of like tunnel-vision. Three pilots became so convergently focused on their goal of fixing the bulb that they forgot to also be divergently flying the plane (scanning the instrument panel, including the altimeter, and being more conscious of how they were doing in general and what their options were). It wasn’t an “or” proposition – they didn’t get to choose whether to be fixing the bulb “or” flying the plane. It was an “and” proposition – they had to be fixing the bulb “and” flying the plane. (see: Mastering the Challenge of the “and” ).  Fixing bulbs is about detail complexity and flying the plane is about dynamic complexity (The Traffic of Dynamic Complexity) and this is a key "and" we have to be mastering with elegant simplicty (Simplicity & Complexity).

Translating the Eastern Airlines story into business, it illustrates how easy it is for very smart and experienced professionals to become so convergently goal oriented (the detail complexity of fixing bulbs) and insufficiently divergent (the dynamic complexity of flying the plane) that the business has gone into an imperceptible descent. Its not that we don’t need a strong convergence of goal-orientation on the detail complexity of fixing bulbs. The question is, do we have equally strong divergence of strategy and execution on the dynamic complexity of flying the plane? In many businesses the answer is, “no” (see: Strategy Tragedy), having defaulted into stupid simplicity this side of detail complexity and dynamic complexity (Simplicity this Side of Complexity).

The ability to navigate a middle road of divergence and convergence is essential to make your business doesn’t go into an imperceptible descent. As Richard Normann says, “today’s free flow of information needs to be transformed into unique concepts and frameworks” and the trouble is, most businesses don’t have the frameworks in place to be navigating well and end up overwhelmed instead. That’s what our work is about – a concept-suite, model-set and tool-box to conceptualize and focalize today’s free flow of thinking, questions , decisions and actions, to avoid overwhelm. Helping you be navigating divergence and convergence well. Avoiding being Eastern Airlines. Travel well.