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Convergence

Convergence is the narrowing move: taking the field of options a group has generated and choosing what to carry forward. It is not the opposite of creativity — it is the half that turns creativity into outcomes. Done badly, it undoes the divergence that preceded it; done well, it leaves the group confident in its choices and glad it generated wildly.

Principles for converging well

  1. Be affirmative first. Start from what is promising rather than what is wrong. Screening for fatal flaws gets its turn later; strengthening comes first — which is what PPCO exists for.
  2. Be deliberate. Choose with explicit criteria or explicit preferences — voting, ranking, scoring — rather than by whoever talks longest.
  3. Check the wild ones before discarding them. Novelty is exactly what you diverged for; don't let "unusual" be read as "unworkable".
  4. Don't converge too early. This is the commonest failure: the group grabs the first workable idea and stops. If the list still feels obvious, diverge again.

Highlighting: hits, clusters, restatements

The workhorse of convergence is a small three-step move called highlighting:

  1. Mark the hits. Sweep the list and mark what stands out. The criteria are deliberately gut-level — it's interesting, it's useful, it gets at the problem, or it simply keeps pulling your eye back. Trust that pull; analysis gets its turn later.
  2. Cluster the related hits. Group the hits that point the same way — Clustering makes this a shared activity.
  3. Restate each cluster. Give every cluster a name that does something: a verb phrase ("pilot the scheme with two teams"), or — when you're clarifying — a fresh "How might we…?" question. A restated cluster is a decision taking shape; an unnamed pile is just tidiness.

What it looks like in Samvinas

The focusing tools — Voting, Ranking, Value / Doability, the Evaluation Matrix — exist to make converging visible and shared, rather than something that happens in the loudest corner of the room.

And convergence only has something to work on because divergence came first.