Schön, Donald

Career

Schön was born on 19 September 1930 and grew up in eastern Massachusetts. His academic training was in philosophy at Yale (bachelor's degree) and Harvard (master's and doctorate). At Yale, he also immersed himself in analyzing theatre plays. Around the same time, he studied advanced music (piano and clarinet) at the Sorbonne in Paris. He was also a product of this time, with a passion for social change.

Throughout his career, Schön drew on the interaction between (a) his training in philosophy, in particular epistemology and Dewey's theory of inquiry for transforming indeterminate situations into more manageable situations; (b) his appreciation of music, in particular the practice of improvisation in jazz ensembles; (c) his passion for social change, in particular the issue of how its messiness defies the canons of instrumental rationality, and (d) his appreciation of organizations as theatre plays, in particular how the exercise of power can be understood as being informed by scripts. Early on in his career, he was also deeply exposed to work at the Tavistock Institute in London on organizational research and intervention.

After his studies, Schön started working as a management consultant at ADL (Arthur D. Little) in Boston, at the time one of the pre-eminent consulting firms focused on technological innovation. His collaboration with Raymond M. Hainer, a scientist at ADL, profoundly influenced him, and he pointed to his intellectual indebtedness to him throughout the rest of his career. In 1963, he published The Displacement of Concepts, later published under other names, exploring how people get to new ideas and pointing to the role of the generative metaphor in framing and inquiry during the process of invention. He was recruited to work for the Commerce Department in the Kennedy administration, [Page 694]in particular in the National Bureau of Standards, with its Experimental Technology Invention Program. In 1967, he published Technology and Change: The New Heraclitus, reviewing models of innovation, observing the propensity of organizations and bureaucracies for ‘dynamic conservatism’ and viewing them as limited ‘learning systems'. Next, he founded OSTI (Organization for Social and Technological Innovation), a consulting firm, where he explored, among others, the organizational difficulties in translating invention into innovation and organizational change. In 1970, he was invited to give the Reith Lectures for the BBC. This led to Beyond the Stable State in 1971. He combined the observation of a permanent change in the external environment at increasing speed with the need to radically transform individual and organizational learning. Rather than seeing organizations in a merely instrumental way, he also saw them as learning systems and political entities.

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