Innovation is often described as the art of generating ideas. But in reality, most companies don’t struggle with too few ideas — they struggle with too many. The real bottleneck is not divergence, it’s convergence.
Convergence is the discipline of choosing. Of saying no to ninety ideas so that one can thrive. Of recognising that resources are finite, and that spreading them too thin turns potential breakthroughs into mediocre results.
AI accelerates divergence — fifty prototypes, a hundred concepts, thousands of variations. But unless leaders master convergence, all this abundance becomes noise. Strategy is not about imagining everything that is possible; it’s about deciding what is worth the bet.
The uncomfortable truth is that innovation dies not from a lack of ideas, but from the inability to converge. And convergence, more than creativity, is what separates companies that transform from those that entertain themselves.