The topoi/issue of particulars and universals in design and management is omnipresent. In his final chapter, “Conclusion: The Entrepreneurial Society,” he differentiates “revolution” from “innovation/entrepreneurship.” It’s too grandiose and uncontrollable. Reminds me of Kuhn’s notion of a paradigm where the dominant course of a society dramatically shifts.

On the contrary, innovation is smaller in scale described as “one step at a time,” “a product here, a policy there, a public service yonder.” He then contrasts “planning” v. focusing on opportunity that is needed in a specific situation (space and time). The focus should be on pragmatic as opposed to dogmatic. The contrast is between modest and grandiose. Love it.

I argued in my presentation at SDN that designers tend to focus on particulars and managers on universals. “Planning” is something that is grand in scale and Drucker points out that innovation and entrepreneurship do not operate at that level (makes me think of Rittel and Webber’s discussion on planning).

Drucker writes,

But innovation, almost by definition, has to be decentralized, ad hoc, autonomous, specific, and micro-economic. It had better start small, tentative, flexible. Indeed, the opportunities for innovation are found, on the whole, only way down and close to events. They are not to be found in the massive aggregates with which the planner deals of necessity, but in the deviations therefrom – in the unexpected, in the incongruity, in the difference between “The glass is half full” and “The glass is half empty,” in the weak link in a process. By the time the deviation becomes “statistically significant” and thereby visible to the planner, it is too late. Innovative opportunities do not come with the tempest but with the rustling of the breeze (p. 255).

This is a great passage on design. There’s some stuff in there that ties in with the idea of service blueprinting. In essence, one can read this passage and argue that Drucker is pointing out the importance of designing at the level of human experience.

And I think I’ve found a new topoi: modest v. grandiose (repositioning the traditional particulars v. universals).