A really useful insight into the pathology of innovation is the fact that at some stage or another, even with projects that are being built with boundless enthusiasm, whistles and bells, nearly all of them run into difficulties surrounded by mounting disillusion.
This is “The Dark Night of the Innovator”. We have all been there, I guess.
So far as I can tell, the concept was first formulated by two colleagues at Synectics in the 1980s – John Philipp and Sandy Dunlop. I included it in a small book, Imagine, which I did for Synectics a few years later.
Even with the most perfect project plan (if there is such a thing), it’s important to remember that things will not always run smooth and that particular care and attention, skill and energy is needed in negotiating one’s way out of the Dark Night.
As the great twentieth century poet, TS Eliot, put it in his “The Hollow Men”:
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow.
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