What is Set-Based 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 Set-Based Convergence™ techniques that help apply the full value of that knowledge to your development process.

With Set-Based Convergence™ Tools, your engineers and managers will gain clear visibility to design windows that their current Set-Based Knowledge supports and to the most valuable places to invest in learning. Rapid, early exploration of the design space is facilitated by that clear visibility, elevating both innovation and reliability of your development process.

Each step of the Set-Based Thinking™ system is enhanced, elevated, and accelerated by leveraging the robust Set-Based Knowledge that your team has been building. For example:

• The focus moves from the Limit Charts being captured to the development of the extensive and varied Trade-Off Charts that can be computed from those Limit Charts.
• Analysis of alternatives via a Set-Based Alternatives Matrix is elevated from a manual exercise to a highly automated computation, that allows rapid what-if analysis and exploration of your design space, dramatically increasing the opportunity for innovation.
• Convergence of the design is made visible, such that project management can move from tasks and milestones to a deep focus on the learning, the knowledge, and the state of the design relative to that knowledge.

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 Set-Based 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 Set-Based Convergence™ in unison. Rather, each team, as they have built up sufficient Set-Based Knowledge, will be able to take the next step to Set-Based Convergence™ at their own pace. And significant incremental value will be delivered with each additional team that moves to that.