What Bad Bunny Taught Us About Divergent Thinking

Near the end of Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show, something unusual happened.

Thirteen minutes of performance, nearly entirely in Spanish. Sugar cane fields. Power line poles. A wedding. A child who looked like a young Benito. Ricky Martin singing a song about gentrification. Lady Gaga in a light blue dress with Puerto Rico’s national flower on her shoulder.

And then, once, in English: “God Bless America.”

Followed by the names of 26 countries across the Americas. Followed by dancers flooding the field with their flags. Followed by a football held high that read “Together We Are America.” Followed by three words in Spanish: seguimos aquí. We’re still here.

128 million people watched. The president called it “an affront to the greatness of America.” Conservative groups organized counter-programming. The FCC opened an investigation. The internet split in half.

And none of it surprised Bad Bunny. He saw it coming from the moment he was announced.

He didn’t optimize for the room. He reframed it.

Two Kinds of Thinking

Convergent thinking asks: How do I succeed within the existing frame?

Divergent thinking asks: What does this moment make possible that couldn’t happen anywhere else?

Most creative decisions — most business decisions, most innovation decisions — are convergent. Leaders are handed a brief, a budget, a stage, a set of constraints, and tasked with finding the best path through them. That’s legitimate, necessary work. Most of the time, it’s exactly right.

But there are moments when the frame itself is the problem. When optimizing within the constraints produces something technically correct and completely wrong. When the answer the situation calls for isn’t a better version of what’s expected — it’s a different question entirely.

Bad Bunny looked at a 13-minute slot in front of the most-watched television event in American sports and saw something different than every headliner before him. Not a platform to showcase his hits. A platform to redefine a word: America. Not the country. The continent. The whole thing.

That’s divergent thinking. And the world is living through a moment that desperately needs more of it.

The Uncomfortable Irony

Americans are supposed to be the world’s leaders in divergent thinking.

America invented the mythology of it. The garage startup. The lone disruptor. The contrarian who bets against the room and wins. Silicon Valley exists as a physical monument to the idea that the best thinking happens outside existing frames. Divergent thinking isn’t just a skill Americans value — it’s practically a national identity.

And it took a Puerto Rican man singing in Spanish to remind us what it actually looks like in practice.

Worth sitting with that for a moment. Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio is an American citizen. Puerto Rico is a US territory. He performed on American soil, at an American sporting event, in front of 128 million Americans. A man who is somehow also a credible professional wrestler. He doesn’t do lanes. And the response from American leadership was: we don’t understand this, it offends us, investigate it.

The man who demonstrated the most genuinely American creative impulse of the night — questioning the frame, redefining the terms, refusing to optimize for the room — is an American who can’t vote for the president of the country he just represented on its biggest stage.

That’s not a footnote. That’s the thesis.

The Convergent Moment We’re In

Institutions are tightening. Companies are narrowing. The pressure to stay on message, align with strategy, know your lane — it’s everywhere and it’s increasing.

This is understandable. In uncertain times, variance feels dangerous. Organizations reach for the familiar. They optimize what they can control. They build better filters.

But here’s what gets lost in convergent moments: the ideas that most need to exist are usually the ones that look wrong from inside the frame. The light blue flag instead of the dark blue one. The Spanish performance on the English-language stage. The halftime show that becomes a history lesson.

Bad Bunny didn’t “take a risk.” He diagnosed what the moment required and built toward it, knowing the backlash was part of the message. The FCC investigation proved the point. The counter-programming proved the point. The president’s dismissal proved the point. That much friction doesn’t get generated without having touched something real.

The gatekeepers said no before he even walked out. The 128 million said yes while it was happening.

What Organizations Get Wrong

Most innovation programs are architecturally convergent. They’re built to improve what exists, not to question whether the existing frame is right.

Submit an idea. Run it through a manager. Take it to a committee. Align it to strategy. Measure it against ROI criteria.

At each gate, good people do their jobs: they make ideas more realistic, more measurable, more aligned, safer. They sand down the edges. They remove the parts that might confuse people.

Xerox PARC invented the graphical user interface, the mouse, and Ethernet. Leadership killed or shelved most of it because the ideas didn’t fit the copier business model. The committee asked: how does this make us better at what we already do? They never asked: what does this make possible that nothing else can?

The ideas weren’t wrong. The frame was.

The question for organizations right now — especially in a convergent moment, especially when the pressure to tighten and narrow is highest — is whether they have systems that let divergent thinking survive. Not just survive the first meeting. Survive the third. Survive the finance review. Survive long enough to find out whether it’s wrong or just early.

Because most divergent ideas look wrong from inside the frame. That’s not a flaw. That’s the definition.

Seguimos Aquí

The most important thing about Bad Bunny’s halftime show wasn’t the spectacle. It was the stubbornness.

He could have performed “Tití Me Preguntó” and “Me Porto Bonito” and given the crowd what they expected. He could have brought out more guests, done more English-language moments, smoothed the edges for the broader audience.

Instead he opened in a sugar cane field. He climbed power line poles to reference Hurricane Maria’s blackout — eight years of infrastructure failure in the most expensive territory in the United States, still not fully restored. He had Ricky Martin sing a song about gentrification and colonial displacement. He reframed “God Bless America” as a continental declaration. He built an entire 13-minute argument that the people in those cane fields, the people without power, the people being priced out of their own neighborhoods — they’re still here.

Seguimos aquí isn’t a closing line. It’s a thesis.

That’s what divergent thinking sounds like when it’s done with full commitment. Not just “thinking outside the box” — questioning whether the box is the right shape for what needs to be said.

Organizations have people thinking this way right now. The question is whether their ideas can find the right stage before the committee makes them more reasonable.

For the practitioner’s guide to building that capacity — the specific triggers, tools, and conditions that make divergent thinking possible inside real organizations — Audrey Crane at DesignMap wrote it. Her piece covers the research, the frameworks, and the moments that signal when it’s time to stop converging and start exploring. This piece makes the case for why it matters right now. Hers shows how.