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.”

The Dark Night of the Innovator

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.