I love execution. Give me a gnarly problem and I want to move on it. So going into this fault line, I expected mostly validation — that real strategic rationality requires both deliberate irrationality and the willingness to burn your own flexibility down to nothing. That’s roughly how I already operate.
That part held up. What surprised me was something underneath it. Most of our pull toward convergent thinking isn’t really strategic at all. It’s psychological. We reach for a fixed plan because we can’t tolerate the tension of not having one — an anchor, a launchpad, something solid to stand on when the situation is genuinely ambiguous. Convergent thinking isn’t just a tool. It’s often anxiety management wearing a business suit.
That’s uncomfortable for me specifically, because I lean convergent by instinct. Decades of daily execution will do that to a person. The shift I’m working on isn’t complicated to describe, even if it’s hard to practice: give myself permission to stay divergent longer, resist converging the moment I feel confident, and only start deducing once I’ve actually let the options pile up.
Here’s the sharper version of that idea, and it came from thinking about Honda. Kawashima wasn’t executing a strategy when he rode that Supercub into the hills outside LA. He was just blowing off steam, still paying attention, not yet locked into a single answer. If he’d converged early and hard on the big-bike plan the way conventional wisdom usually pushes leaders to, he never notices the neighbors asking where to get one. Staying divergent longer isn’t really about creativity in some abstract sense. It’s about being able to notice things you’d otherwise miss, because you haven’t already decided what you’re looking for.
That reframes something I thought I understood about this whole fault line. I assumed the answer was balance — lean convergent sometimes, divergent other times, find the healthy middle. I don’t think that’s actually the answer anymore. Most people default convergent immediately, because they can’t handle any ambiguity at all. People actively trying to balance both, like me, are already doing better than that. But balance might just be the next rung up a ladder, not the top of it. The people who actually produce breakthroughs — the Kawashimas, the geniuses we point to across history — tolerate staying in divergent discomfort far longer than “balance” would ever permit, right up until the last possible moment before they’re forced to act.
Balance isn’t the sophisticated position I assumed it was. It might just be a more comfortable stopping point than real breakthroughs actually require.
Which leaves me with the same open question I can’t shake: how do we actually know when to stop exploring and start exploiting? There’s no clean trigger for it — no bell that rings, no threshold that lights up. We’re all just guessing at the transition point, some of us defaulting to extremes, the rest of us defaulting to a “balance” that might just be a more comfortable way of guessing wrong.