April 23, 2020

Convergence Design was launched ten years ago on the idea of bringing work, family and community commitments into a seamless whole–trying not to be different people at work than we are at home or out in our communities. That’s the “convergence” part of Convergence Design: trying to merge all our various selves into an integrated person.

We have, over the years, had many of what we like to call Convergence Moments: moments where, because of emergencies, deadlines, illness, or happenstance, our work and family lives intersect in more obvious and dramatic ways. Like the time one of our employees had to pick up their daughter from day care and bring her to the office for a few hours while she worked on a big deadline. Or the time child care plans fell through and another employee had to bring three kids to the office for a day. We not only don’t mind those Convergence Moments, we celebrate them.

When I saw Today Show host Savannah Guthrie get zoombombed by her own son on live TV this morning, the realization hit me that we are all living in a Convergence Moment right now. Everyone has their work, family and community commitments “in a muddle,” as C.S. Lewis might say, and we’re all figuring this thing out on the fly. We’ve had kids crawl into laps in our (what used to be called) “business meetings” on Zoom in the past few weeks, and it’s starting to seem almost normal. Oddly, this is what Convergence Design has been about from the start. Only now we’re seeing it everywhere, every day.

We’re not talking about working from home, necessarily. We still see tremendous value in the kind of team collaboration that can only happen when you’re working shoulder to shoulder on a project. Although with spatial distancing, “shoulder to shoulder” may be more metaphorical than actual for several months. But stay-at-home orders, Zoom meetings, and people having to deal with their whole families all day long instead of just mornings and evenings has brought all of us, ready or not, into a place of Convergence. The question is whether we will embrace it, or just pray that it ends soon so we can go back to being the separated selves we were before.

It is my sincere hope that we will learn to enjoy the converged lives that have been forced upon us by the novel coronavirus. Not, as I say, that we should all want to work from home from now on. But that we are no longer startled when young kids (or aging parents, or pets, or calls from the blood center) crawl into our laps, so to speak, at inopportune times. The pandemic has given us an unexpected gift: the gift of no longer having to pretend that we don’t have families, don’t have friends, don’t have other commitments outside of work. We should embrace that gift and bring our whole selves, with all those jangly, dangling accessories, to the office whenever we are able to return.