Convergence - Divergence

If someone asks me what my favourite album is, i’ll probably choose something carefully. I won’t want to go for anything too mainstream, lest i appear unimaginative, but equally i don’t want to choose something so utterly obscure that i have to provide three minutes of context about how i discovered them whilst on a surf trip to Portugal, playing the back room of the third most popular bar. I want it to be different enough to make me interesting, but not so different that i sound like i’m trying too hard. And it can’t be the same thing my brother chooses, because that would never fly. And it shouldn’t be offensive, because you may judge me. And the odds are, that when i ask the question back, we will have made different choices from each other. Music tastes diverge widely.

By contrast, if i ask you if you are honest, you will probably say ‘yes’, or maybe ‘as honest as anyone can be’. And so will i. We will tend to converge to a social norm.

If we work together, and take a course together, and someone asks us if we adhere to the company values… well, i don’t know about you, but i’d probably say yes. Unless i was feeling contrary. I mean, it doesn’t cost me anything, and what’s the point in standing out from the crowd?

Unless the facilitator was extremely annoying, and i knew that my friends would laugh. Then maybe i would. After all, anything that bonds us more closely together in adversity is a good thing.

Formal learning tends to work towards convergence, certainly for things like compliance training, or culture work. We even say we don’t just want people to think differently, we want them to ‘do’ differently too – but by that we mean that we want them to do the thing we want them to do.

Social Learning approaches, by contrast, can be more like asking people for their favourite album, in that they will choose something that is music, but it may not be to your taste. Inherently a Social Learning approach is more tolerant of divergent narratives, precisely because the outcomes are held in narratives – personal and co-created community narratives – and the forces that act upon us as we write these stories are both formal and sociocultural.?

Understanding this can provide a useful perspective on how, and when, to use Social Learning approaches within a holistic learning approach for an Organisations. Using methods that foster both divergence, and convergence, can be helpful, in that it allows us to be usefully aligned, and creatively different through curiosity. Almost like a frame and a picture: the frame we may wish to be shared – a convergent view, but the pictures can all be different, because nobody wants the house filled with identikit images.

This may speak to leadership too: leaders who foster divergence, and can listen as opposed to respond. Leadership is a divergent feature.

I have found that this language, of convergence and divergence, has made it’s way into the vocabulary of my practice, across multiple areas, but i hope not in a naive way. It’s easy to say that ‘we value different thinking’, or ‘diverse teams are stronger teams’, but this is not necessarily true. There is a need to understand how that divergence is held. Otherwise it’s simply an aberration that we persecute. What is often meant is ‘you can be different within this one narrow context, but please ensure you conform to a common view in all others, at all other times’. We want creative difference, when it suits us.

I suspect that we could shift to a wide focus on this and consider that, at the widest level, divergence may be held, in a Socially Dynamic Organisation, in a diverse tribal structure, loosely interconnected back into the formal ones. So we have both structure and uncertainty, convergence and difference, held in a dynamic tension.

#WorkingOutLoud on Social Learning and Leadership