What is Targeted Convergence™?

After some time practicing Set-Based Thinking™ techniques, you will have built up a powerful body of Set-Based Knowledge that can be leveraged in future designs. With that in place, your team will be able to learn Targeted Convergence™ techniques that help apply the full value of that knowledge to your designs.

With Targeted Convergence™, you stop building to specifications; in fact, the specs emerge along with the design, based on your learning about your customers, your products, and the technologies your products are based upon. Replacing specs at the beginning of projects are targets: targets express sets or ranges of customer interests that you want the product to end up within, though you may not yet be sure what is possible or compatible.

That lack of knowledge about what's possible given today's technology, what's compatible within a single product design, and what are the most desirable trade-offs to your customers, we call "Knowledge Gaps". The first step in planning out a development project will be indentifying those Knowlege Gaps (Knowledge Gap Analysis™) so that you can make plans to fill those gaps; and so that your design efforts can proceed forward, leaving open sets of possibilities until those gaps are filled.

The development process is thus transformed into a process of convergence from all that you know is possible and compatible, to the particular design decisions and specifications for a specific product that best satisfy those targets that were laid out at the start of the project.

Note that learning has become central to the process. The process starts with what you know from past projects, identifies what you need to learn first, and then proceeds only as you learn what you need to know to make decisions. And with Set-Based Thinking™ techniques as a foundation, all of that learning will be captured for the benefit of all future projects, resulting in a steep and steady increase in product development performance. Learning-First Product Development! (Its no wonder Toyota is outperforming the next five most profitable car makers combined.)

TCC offers the same pair of services for Targeted Convergence that we did with Set-Based Thinking™: a semester-long experiential training course and a software solution to elevate that capability to its fullest.

Note that it is not necessary for your whole company to move to Targeted Convergence™ in unison. Rather, each team, as they have built up sufficient Set-Based Knowledge, will be able to take the next step to Targeted Convergence™ at their own pace. And significant incremental value will be delivered with each additional team that moves to that.