“If you have only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”
Convergence is a dynamic abstraction, indicating motion toward uniformity or union. By way of illustration, Webster’s uses the elegant example of “coordinated movement of the two eyes so that the image of a single point is formed on the corresponding retinal areas.”
What convergence means in the context of life sciences, however, is somewhat less clear. On one hand, we have the convergence of academic disciplines, scientific knowledge, and professional expertise. Biologists with training in applied mathematics or, better yet, software engineering are in high demand. Academia is awakening to the value of interdisciplinary linkages, and top universities are rushing to create novel programs that bring together scholars and students from different fields. We might call this interdisciplinary convergence; its goal is to generate breakthrough ideas by encouraging eclectic thinking.
Within the life sciences industry, on the other hand, there’s a movement toward technological convergence. And all kinds of enterprises are getting in on the act—information technology firms, wireless companies, manufacturers of drugs, devices, and diagnostics, not to mention management consultants for whom the architecture of convergence represents a strategic opportunity. Indeed, Deloitte Research recently published a study titled Managing Pathways to Convergence in the Life Sciences Industry. According to the authors, “convergence is defined as the integration of two or more core technologies (diagnostics, devices, and/or drugs) to create an improved healthcare product.”
Interest in convergence, both in academic and industrial circles, is in part a response to overspecialization. Scientists joke about sharpening their minds by narrowing them, yet it’s too often the case that, within universities and companies alike, groups of experts find themselves isolated with only each other to talk to. This partly reflects the explosive growth of information. The life sciences are being conducted on a scale the world has never seen. To be proficient in any sub-field requires mastering an ever larger and growing body of knowledge. In a system as complicated as healthcare, though, which has so many interconnected components, specialization may cause as many problems as it solves. “If you have only a hammer,” Abraham Maslow once remarked, “every problem looks like a nail.”
In a sense, what’s driving convergence in its various forms is the need to develop what Peter Senge calls “systems thinking.” In his book The Fifth Discipline (1990), Senge, who teaches at MIT, writes that organizations tend to focus on “visible” knowledge that is “explicit, teachable, independent, detachable.” Opening up the lens to envisage the larger systems in which knowledge exists, he explains, enables one to grasp the dynamic interrelationships among seemingly disparate elements and, for example, how actions that solve immediate problems can be harmful in the long term.
The underlying problem for systems thinking, and for convergence, is that so many organizations are, in effect, collections of silos. Even today, most academic departments place no official value on anything a faculty member achieves in a different discipline. A young chemist who publishes an important paper on molecular genetics would earn no credit toward tenure in the chemistry department. American medicine is notoriously Balkanized, with specialists organized into societies of “ologists” whose main objective is to protect some patch of professional turf. Companies, as they grow and develop complex managerial hierarchies, suffer from similar divisions, creating the need for “skunk works”—semiautonomous groups who pursue innovative projects outside the organization’s normal bureaucratic channels.
Convergence is bound to require a little creative destruction. The barriers are great, but the value of breaking them down is far greater.