I read a post recently that captured my attention for more time than I expected. The piece fascinated me, and I sent it to my son and a couple friends. In fact, reading it caused me to stop working for a bit as I thought through some of the concepts and ideas. It's about divergence and convergence, and how you can use these ideas when trying to be creative. I recommend you take a few minutes and go through it.

Is this something we ought to do a bit in database design? Should we spend first some time on divergent, creative thinking for how to implement some new entity or design some schema? Do you ever do this in your job, especially in a team? Or do you just push forward with your first thoughts, relying on experience and instinct? That's what I've often done.

We certainly need convergence thinking. We have to get things done and deliver software. Most of us are probably good at the convergent side of thinking and writing code or queries or configuring systems. Most of us probably do some amount of divergent and convergent thinking at the same time.

However, I'm not sure that's the best way to tackle creative work, especially when building complex systems or working to solve new types of problems. There is some value in separating out the brainstorming portion from the actual, let's write some code and see if it works. Getting a good list of potential ideas and spending a few minutes thinking about them before writing code helps us to avoid getting trapped pursuing into the first thing that works and possibly see other approaches.

In today's world of DevOps, trying to move faster and get small chunks of work to the customer quicker, we are under pressure to do more convergent work, quicker. If we want to ensure we do model our entities well and follow good database design practices, we need to spend some time with divergent thinking without doing work, perhaps speculating on potential future design challenges in advance. If we periodically spend this time, then we can rely on our previous brainstorming when it is time to converge and get things done.