> In other words: engineers are only good at "yes, but" (convergent thinking phase) and prematurely shut down the "yes, and" (divergent thinking phase). I do t

> In other words: engineers are only good at "yes, but" (convergent thinking phase) and prematurely shut down the "yes, and" (divergent thinking phase). I do this sometimes. In many cases, I feel like "yes, and" would be an endorsement of the original idea. If I say "yes, and" and then there are delays or problems in implementation because of things that would have been obvious to "no, but", the question becomes "why wasn't this brought up earlier on before people sunk so much time in." In the reverse case, saying "no, but" in a case where the problem is easily surmountable just makes the questioner look like a good planner. So in that sense the reason devs tend to "no, but" is matter of them responding to incentives; it's not that they can't think divergently, it's that they're putting themselves at risk for little reward for doing so. > So how about we treat thinking as a two-phase problem and give divergent thinking some room? Yes, I think separating these two phases (and thus separating "throwing an idea out there" from "endorsing an idea as definitely workable with no foreseeable complications") would be very helpful.