Convergence Review
A monthly leadership meeting that classifies every active scenario as converging, holding, or collapsing — and moves the stakes attached to each accordingly.
What Convergence Review is.
Convergence Review. The Convergence Review is the standing monthly forum in the Steer phase of Woodring's Loop where a leadership team sorts every scenario in its active set into Converging, Holding, or Collapsing — then grows, holds, or reduces the stake sized for each. It is where the strategic plan itself gets put on the table, not just the numbers inside it.
What it is
The Convergence Review is the named practice of Steer — a monthly meeting whose only job is to look at the scenario set and decide what moves. It exists because most organizations run Scan sometimes, Story rarely, Stake annually, and then nothing. There is a plan, execution against the plan, and a quarterly review of how execution is tracking — but no standing forum where the plan itself is rebuilt against current reality. The Convergence Review is that forum, and predictive planning fails without it.
How to run the meeting
The format is deliberately minimal: three columns — Converging, Holding, Collapsing — with every scenario in the active set living in one column by the end of the meeting. Any movement between columns since the last review gets named explicitly, along with the signals that drove the move. The second half is about stakes: for every scenario that changed columns, the attached stakes get re-examined and adjusted in the room. Ninety minutes, monthly, no deck longer than the three-column board. Run it as a status update and it stops working.
What it decides
The meeting decides where capital and attention go. A scenario that is converging — signals accumulating faster than the modal expectation — makes its stakes more valuable, so those stakes grow or accelerate. A scenario that is collapsing — required signals failing to appear, or contradicting signals piling up — gets its stakes reduced, redirected, or killed, and that call is made in the room rather than deferred. The meeting ends with a written list of stake adjustments and a named owner for each.
Common questions.
- How is a Convergence Review different from a quarterly reforecast?
- A reforecast updates the numbers inside a fixed plan — it can move a figure from $42M to $38M and call that an adjustment. A Convergence Review updates the plan itself, including the right to take a $30M stake off the table entirely and reallocate to a scenario that is converging. One asks whether the numbers changed; the other asks whether the plan is still the right plan.
- What do the three columns mean?
- Converging means a scenario's leading signals are accumulating faster than they would under the modal expectation — increased likelihood backed by named evidence, not certainty. Collapsing means the signals required for the scenario are failing to appear or being contradicted. Holding means neither is happening yet. Every active scenario sits in exactly one column at the end of the meeting.
- How often should the meeting move stakes?
- Most months, nothing moves — and that is the right answer most months. The value of running the Convergence Review on a fixed monthly cadence is that the team can act decisively when a scenario genuinely converges or collapses, because the forum already exists and nobody is improvising it. Constant small tweaks are a failure mode called micro-steering; discipline is not the same thing as activity.
Source: Chapter 9 — Steer · Predictive Planning (Colloquial Media, 2026)
More of the vocabulary.
- Woodring's Loop
The four-phase continuous cycle at the core of predictive planning — Scan, Story, Stake, Steer — that turns weak signals into strategic decisions.
- Cycle Audit
A diagnostic that measures what your annual planning cycle actually costs — in senior attention, budget, and frozen strategic conversation — before you decide to retire it.
- AI/Human Split
The allocation rule inside Woodring's Loop: give the volume work to the machine and keep the judgment work for the people whose names are on the decision.
- Stake Sizing Matrix
A decision tool in Woodring's Loop that sizes any strategic commitment against two axes — the team's conviction in the scenario and the cost of being wrong.