Drew Barontini | Protected Divergence

When U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower entered office in 1953, the country was in an intense state of uncertainty. The Korean War was still underway; the Soviet Union had become a nuclear power; there was political, military, and ideological pressure across Europe, Asia, and elsewhere.

In the face of uncertainty, you need a strategy—a way to reason about the problems and filter them through a mental model to help you uncover the best possible solution.

That’s why President Eisenhower created Project Solarium, named after the solarium room on the top floor at the White House. It was an exercise in strategy and foreign policy design, focused on producing a consensus among senior officials for the strategy to deal with Soviet expansionism. The project had separate task forces to concentrate on different strategies. Each task force explored one strategy before bringing together each one so President Eisenhower could ultimately decide.

By avoiding moving to consensus too soon, they protected divergence. They expanded their perspectives with divergent thinking.

Swap the political apparatus for a creative one and consider another example: Pixar, the well-known animation studio that became part of Disney. In the book Creativity, Inc. (a wonderful book if you haven’t read it), Ed Catmull describes how Pixar developed a process they call “The Braintrust” to help their creative teams provide feedback to movies in progress. They review rough versions of the work and provide constructive feedback when things are still early in the process so there is time to correct it. The feedback focuses on the underlying reasons, not shallow “I don’t like it” responses. To create a productive session like this, you need smart people who care about making the product better, not politicking or manipulating.

Ed Catmull says it best:

“Put smart, passionate people in a room together, charge them with identifying and solving problems, and encourage them to be candid with one another.”

These are completely different examples, yet they represent a shared philosophy:

Making good decisions requires diverse perspectives and clear objectives aligned with finding the best solution.

Now throw AI into the mix. Why bring together a group of smart people with distinct perspectives when you can just ask Claude or ChatGPT in a single chat? You can. But you’ll also suffer from key failure modes:

You don’t have enough perspective to see the core, underlying problem.
You reach a consensus too quickly and miss the opportunity for a better solution.
You don’t bring your own and the collective understanding along with it.

You miss the problem, solve it in the wrong way, or lose coherence in the process.

If, instead, you protect divergence, you will:

Know the problem.
Find the best solution.
Improve your understanding.

In Issue #105, I introduced KnowFlow, one of the three key systems as part of Claritorium. It is part one of this three-part series:

KnowFlow for developing understanding.
Solarium for expanding perspective.
Praxis for embodying understanding.

This is now about Solarium, and my process for expanding perspective before deciding.

There are three models in Solarium:

Perspective Council to engage distinct voices.
Constructive Tension to protect useful disagreements.
Integrated Judgement to decide with perspective.

You expand your perspective by engaging unique viewpoints, hold the tension, and make sound decisions through improved judgement.

Perspective Council

Whose perspective would change how I see this?

For most of human history, books weren’t nearly as accessible as they are now. Each text had to be manually inscribed or copied, and transport was slow and difficult. Owning a book was more like owning a handcrafted instrument than a reproducible artifact. Today, though, you can read books on innumerable devices, listen to audiobooks, and find printed copies online, in book stores, and public libraries. I use my library card with apps like Libby and Hoopla to read and listen to books for free. We also buy physical books constantly. My office is filled with books because I want to be surrounded by them.

Books are magical portals into centuries of human experiences, stories, and thinking.

Someone spends years distilling knowledge into a book. Then you get to live in the thinking as you read with them. That’s why I love memoirs, meditations, and biographies. They are a window into the how and why behind people’s experiences; a journey in which you get to tag along and participate.

The Perspective Council model is how you expand your worldview by:

Reading books to understand others unique life experiences and perspectives.
Learning from others you work with, talk to, and encounter in your life.
Building your own council to converge on a problem and protect divergence.

Books + Conversations + Collaborations

Constructive Tension

What does the disagreement reveal?

I used to believe books were too sacred to write in or highlight. I would keep them in pristine condition. They always looked new.

I thought I was respecting the author and the book this way. I held this belief until I heard Ryan Holiday, author of several books on Stoicism, say the exact opposite:

“If you’re not reading with a pen, you’re not really reading. Reading is a conversation. Great readers underline and make notes in the margins. They ask questions. They put the author on trial. They talk back.”

I also heard him say he doesn’t believe someone when they say a book of his is one of their favorites if it doesn’t look worn down. It should have notes, highlights, dog-eared pages. It should be engaged with, lived in.

So now that’s what I do. And I love it. It feels like a beautiful conversation. Material sits with me longer when I read it, talk back, and then think about why I agreed or disagreed with the author’s opinion. My favorite thing, though, is reading a used book where another reader has already left notes. I’ve been slowly reading Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy, which includes notes from a man written in the 1980s. So not only do I get to add my own perspective, I get to sit with what others saw and experienced before me, in their own life and at a different time.

If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is.

The Constructive Tension model helps you live in tension and see disagreement revealing truth instead of impeding progress.

You do this by:

Framing the tension by finding language that highlights the differences.
Stating the assumptions clearly to establish the foundation of thinking.
Identifying the biases at play that change and manipulate your perception.

Tension + Assumptions + Biases

Integrated Judgement

How have the perspectives changed my judgment?

Knowledge only becomes useful when you do something with it. When you make a decision or change your behavior or expand your perspective. The change becomes a catalyst for growth.

Integration is one of the pillars of Equilio because complex systems rely on a deep understanding of the rich relationships, dependencies, and integration points.

Take software as the example.

It’s common for front-end engineers to build out the front-end user interface of a feature, stubbing in fake data in place of real back-end data. But when it comes time to integrate with the back-end, all the issues show up. That’s because, in a complex system like software, the relationships and dependencies dictate complexity. You have to build in an integrated environment from the beginning so the alignments and misalignments surface early and often. You hone your judgement when you understand why something does or doesn’t work because of the holism of the integration.

I was working with our Head of Design on a new design concept. In an AI world, I like design to focus on exploratory conceptual design. When the idea is too loose, design thinking helps frame the conversation around a visual direction. We talked through the design and considered next steps. We thought about bringing together a larger group, but we agreed it would create a “design by committee” and would force too quick of a consensus. So we decided, instead, to have interviews with key stakeholders to capture their perspective without polluting the thinking of a larger group. We then used that to inform the design and iterate independently.

The Integrated Judgement model is how you incorporate new mental models into a consolidated perspective that improves your judgement by:

Seeing the agreements where alignment is clear between perspectives.
Highlighting the disagreements where perspectives diverge cleanly.
Reframing your understanding to produce new shared meaning.

Agreements + Disagreements + Reframing

Your Solarium

Solarium is a system I use across each of the three models, engaging with three distinct perspective environments to expand my thinking and leverage modern technology. When I talk about integration, this is a perfect example. You should work with real people you know and trust, learn from historical figures and perspectives, and leverage AI to simulate divergent thinking you can compare against the prior methods.

The Three Models

Perspective Council. Read widely, engage in discussions about what you’re thinking, and find your own “Braintrust” of people you know will expand your thinking.
Constructive Tension. Be mindful of the tension, start from the assumptions to validate, and see if you’re victim to any cognitive biases influencing your thinking.
Integrated Judgement. Find common ground, where you disagree, and use language to reframe your understanding based on everything you know and didn’t before.

The Three Perspectives

Real People. Humans bring unique voices, lived experiences, and core values shaped by those experiences. There’s no better alternative than engaging in debate, discussion, and deep conversations with smart people you know, trust, and respect. There are people I respect and disagree with. They have different philosophies. That’s okay! Good even!
Historical Figures. Books are the easiest entry point into the minds of the greatest historical thinkers. I’ve told this story before, but I love Leonardo da Vinci. My wife bought me Leonardo’s Notebooks, a massive book with scanned copies of his notebooks, along with translations of all his writing. I love it. It’s a beautiful portrayal into the mind of a creative genius. It’s a small glimpse into how he thought and interpreted the natural world. Read books, focusing on biographies, memoirs, and meditations on life experiences.
AI Simulations. My Solarium project in ChatGPT is built to simulate five great thinkers that map cleanly to my five core values. They’re also historical figures whose thinking, in one way or another, shapes how I think about modern challenges I face. The five historical figures are Marcus Aurelius, Leonardo da Vinci (of course!), Charles Darwin, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Henry David Thoreau. They each represent a distinct perspective that can be simulated in ChatGPT. But remember, an LLM is only offering a representation based off of its training data, including anything written by and about these figures. It’s never meant to be a fully realistic recreation of how they’d respond to you. Use mindfully.

The Practice

If I had to condense the Solarium into a single practice, it would be:

Start in explorer mode. Don’t immediately jump to a solution. And don’t immediately jump into Claude or ChatGPT and try and solve it right away. Reaching consensus too soon misses the opportunity to solve the problem in the right way.
Think out loud. Share your thinking out in the open. Write, talk, get together in small groups with people you trust. Focus on exposing everyone’s thinking in one space so it can coalesce and alchemize into something stronger.
Call out the tension. Surface the tensions, assumptions, and biases in the mixture of ideas and thinking. Make it clear what all the thinking rests on so you can pull it apart, study it, and then piece it back into a clear path forward.
Reframe your understanding. Use language that simplifies your understanding. Keep writing, talking, and thinking until clarity emerges. But give it time. Don’t force it. Let the words surface naturally as you engage with the material.
Make a strategic decision. When the time comes, commit. Make a decision knowing you gave the idea the time it deserves. You engaged multiple perspectives until you settled on the best possible path forward, improving your judgement as a result.

Expand Understanding

KnowFlow develops understanding.

Solarium expands it.

Don’t let AI or groupthink force you or your team into an early consensus. You miss out on the opportunity to spark new insights along the way. You can’t prompt insights, and you can’t understand without participating in the process. Be a curious explorer as the idea unfolds, develops, and evolves naturally.

Protect divergence. Better decisions are on the other side.