The Art of Big-Picture Thinking

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Given the nearly unprecedented uncertainties caused by the rise of generative AI, professionals must accomplish their work at high levels and remain relevant, yet with little job security.

Whatever field or industry they work in, today's knowledge workers (a term coined in the late 1950s by management expert Peter Drucker and now in widespread use) are often specialists in one or more endeavors—a fact of life that creates challenges beyond how well they perform and collaborate with colleagues. They must also be attuned to the mission their organization is trying to accomplish, communicate the importance of their role, and justify their place within that organization and mission.

And that brings with it a larger challenge—figuring out the big picture, the overall mission of the organization, and where each fits in. As Drucker himself told workers : "You must take integrating responsibility for putting yourself into the big picture."

Cultivating Big Picture Thinking

How and where you fit into the big picture isn’t always readily apparent. It requires big-picture thinking.

A good way to start is to realize that there is a big picture in the first place. What is your organization trying to accomplish, and how is it going about it? What ecosystems does it operate within— not just in which industries, markets, or fields of study, but in terms of communities and society? Who are the people the organization tries to serve?

Seeing the big picture doesn’t mean ignoring the details. Focus is important, yet we must make sure we are focusing on the right things. This requires putting facts and details into context while thinking holistically and system-wide. Sometimes it means zooming out for a bird’s-eye view.

Drucker urged people to widen their horizons and take an expansive view of themselves and what they want to accomplish. It requires thinking about what constitutes their own big picture as an individual at work and outside of it. Doing so enables people to determine aspirations, set goals, and know how to allocate their time.

Big-picture thinking means constantly being alert and observational, discovering and acting upon relevant information. That includes having a sense of what to read in various formats (in print, on the web, in various apps.), plus who to talk and listen to. Above all, it means paying close attention.

Detecting Patterns

Pattern recognition contributes to discerning the big picture and our roles and responsibilities. Drucker wrote often about the need for training perception and the ability to see patterns. “In the new society of organizations, you need to be able to recognize patterns to see what is there rather than what you expect to see," he said presciently in a 1993 Harvard Business Review interview.

Drucker was known for employing visual and visualization-related metaphors in his work and writing. “The characteristic of the innovator,” he declared 60 years ago, “is the ability to envisage as a system what to others are unrelated, separate elements.”

An important part of Drucker‘s life was appreciation for and deep knowledge of Japanese art; he even taught the subject in the early 1980s at Pomona College. And that, too, was related to his ideas of perception and discerning the big picture/larger context. "What interests him in Japanese art," said art writer Suzanne Muchnic, “ is not only the fine points of its styles, techniques, subjects, and creators but how it fits into world art history and what makes it special.”

Looking Out of Windows

Drucker was known for the observation/metaphor that he "looked out the window" to see what was visible but unseen by others. If we want to follow his example, we need to look out of not one but many windows and from a variety of vantage points and in different time periods. Looking at the same data or information, what do you perceive that others do not? Can you communicate its importance to your colleagues and anyone else who needs to know?

Drucker acknowledged that trained perception is not always natural or familiar. “We perceive, as a rule, what we expect to perceive. We see largely what we expect to see, and we hear largely what we expect to hear,” he said in a 1969 presentation in Tokyo to the Fellows of the International Academy of Management: “Perception, we know, is not logic," he added. "It is experience. This means, in the first place, that one always perceives a configuration. One cannot perceive single specifics. They are always part of a total picture.”

Cognition Essential Reads

How Your Eyes Communicate With Your Ears

The Philosophical Enigma of Large Language Models

Conclusion: An Ongoing Process

Training perception is an ongoing process, as is the professional development that furthers our claim to a role in the big picture. Refining big-picture thinking can be a source of continual enrichment of our lives, inside and outside the workplace.