The swing between the singular and the universal

We often swing between the singular and the universal. Living only in the singular, we feel a certain emptiness in our understanding. When we move to the universal, we gain an understanding in which we feel reality has slipped through our fingers. It is a swing that never comes to rest.

The hands of the universal have been pushing the swing for centuries. Often with excessive confidence, yet unable to find the proof of their arrogance. Up on that swing, we have lost the sensitivity to appreciate the reason of the singular. Like gold panners in a river, we discard everything that is not golden particles: the soil at the bottom, the clay, the gravel, the dirty water.

Horst W.J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber, in their 1973 classic Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning, pushed the swing towards the singular, exposing some of the limits of the other extreme, this time with the universal in its most successful form to date: science.

The search for scientific bases for confronting problems of social policy is bound to fail, because of the nature of these problems.

Rittel lived the swing's oscillation first-hand. When he began developing his ideas about the kind of problems that do not sit well within the traditional approach, he was really putting to the test the scientific program he himself had internalized. On confronting it with the singular, with everyday reason and everyday action, he began to notice that the orchestra was out of tune.

His push helped us recognize the singular in wicked problems.

A class of social system problems which are ill-formulated, where the information is confusing, where there are many clients and decision makers with conflicting values, and where the ramifications in the whole system are thoroughly confusing.

What we have known ever since under the label of design thinking comes from this movement of the swing. It pushes us towards the specific; towards context; towards the detail that can barely be shared with another reality, not through analogy, metaphor or extrapolation, because in that operation it would lose its meaning.

There is a close relationship between that movement and the genesis of what came to be known as endogenous growth theory. In 1962 Kenneth Arrow published his famous article The Economic Implications of Learning by Doing, coloring with his voice and his clear, concise, honest style a problem that economics as a discipline had not faced. Arrow turned growth inside out like a sock, underlining internal factors against a tradition that explained everything from elements external to the organization itself.

The novelty Arrow was pointing at is innovation, which by now we have turned into routine. That is why it is always good to return to the music the American economist was appealing to, beyond lyrics already spoiled by overhandling.

Arrow helped us see that every day is a learning. That we need no special preparation for it. It simply happens. We learn about our cities by walking their streets. We learn about sizes and magnitudes by contemplating tiny ants with one eye and enormous trees with the other. We even learn about things as slippery as love simply by loving. That kind of learning is a sort of compass that guides us through all the days of our lives.

There is something magical when something simply happens. Things seem to have a life of their own; their own order; their own rules. We humans are not the ones in control, and we simply watch a spectacle that seems beyond our capabilities. How on earth does my body work by itself? How on earth do cells manage to organize themselves? Who is steering the ship, we ask from our short anthropocentric view.

The contributions of Rittel and Arrow help us build products with a more conscious grasp of their original and specific nature.

On the one hand, it is good medicine against the constant siren song of methodologies and magazine covers, which tend to create the mirage of universal rules; it gives us the confidence to take actions that help us, even if from the outside they may look clumsy or rudimentary, or simply do not always work out. Innovation in the trades has never been a straight line.

On the other hand, it is a compass that guides us out of the box: outside the contours of our product, outside ourselves. That compass asks us to listen and to understand, since we do not control what happens out there. Where things have a life of their own, far from our customer journeys and our immaculate prototypes.