Why Divergence Matters

Since launching Diverge, we’ve had a few people ask where we “fit”.

It’s a fair question. Our work spans product, design, branding, marketing, technology, and business strategy. That can look broad from the outside, especially in a world that prefers specialists with clearly defined lanes.

When setting up Diverge, this was something I thought about a lot. The standard advice when launching a venture is to start narrow and expand later. But I chose not to follow it.

The reason is simple. Every meaningful problem I’ve worked on over the years has required multiple disciplines working together. Product decisions affect brand. Technology choices shape experience. Commercial models influence design. Asking teams to split that work across several agencies creates friction, gaps, and diluted ownership.

We wanted to offer a joined-up approach. Either end-to-end delivery, or senior support that fills the gaps inside an existing team.

There’s an old saying that gets misquoted a lot: “Jack of all trades, master of none.” The full line ends with “but oftentimes better than a master of one.” It was meant as a compliment.

That idea matters. We’re divergent thinkers first. We explore possibilities, challenge assumptions, and generate options. An exec trainer once described me as an “ideas factory”, which felt accurate. Divergence creates space. Convergence brings focus. Both are necessary, but too many projects fail because teams rush to delivery before spending enough time on the idea itself.

As Rob Ryan put it recently, if someone asked him to design a chair, he’d make the best chair he possibly could. That mindset runs through Diverge. We don’t start with “is this in scope?” We start with “what does this problem actually need?”

We don’t fit neatly into a traditional agency model, and we’re comfortable with that. If you’re dealing with a complex challenge, unclear direction, or a problem that doesn’t sit cleanly in one discipline, that’s exactly where we do our best work.

If you need help figuring out what to do next, get in touch. We’ll work it out together.