The Detail versus the Big Picture

So many seem to have been credited with the notion that the Devil (or is it God?) is in the detail – Goethe, Flaubert, Mies van der Rohe and Aby Warburg among them, not to mention Paul’s Letter to the Romans.

But is it really the detail that matters most?

I remember, at an international meeting of Synectics people in Washington DC, my esteemed colleague Vincent Nolan enjoined us all to attend to the detail. And immediately he was flatly contradicted by Sandy Dunlop.

“If anywhere,” said Sandy, “he is in the Big Picture.”

Whose desire is it anyway?

I wrote recently about “insight” processes and their role in discovering desires we didn’t know we had.

In parallel with newly emerging desires is the capacity we all seem to have to pick up on other people’s desires for ourselves, almost telepathically.

This process, the French philosopher and literary analyst, René Girard, called “mimetic desire”. He first articulated his theory in his 1961 book (in English), Deceit, Desire and the Novel.

In it he analysed novels by Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust and Dostoevsky, demonstrating that, although characters would cling strongly to the notion that a desire was their own, in fact it was always provoked by the desire of another for the same object or objective.

In society as in literature, the “others” may be friends, family, colleagues or neighbours, or they may equally be people far outside of the personal circle, so easy to access nowadays through Hello magazine and the like.

I wonder how many innovators and marketers have studied Girard?