Say you're standing in front of a cliff, like the one below. All you can see is rock -- in front, above, all around -- and conclude that the path is dangerous, daunting, and can't be scaled. Perhaps you smile a little because looking closer you see someone has carved a cute little heart into the rock, but love is fickle man, and right now you just really need to get to unstuck.
So you step back and see all sorts of things... that there's actually a path around the cliff, that it gets less impressive farther down, and that there's a pleasant walk along the beach which might make you happier than the overhead climb... a panoramic solution.
"Look at the bigger picture" is not news (cf. [1], [2], [3], [4]) but it's easy enough to forget or take for granted. In addition to more easily re-assessing your options, when you step back, you can also re-asses your goals, and choose the best solution that gets you to the better goal. It's also pretty fun to try implementing the big-picture view in almost any activity. If you're reading a research article, think about how it applies to your work or to a peer's work. If you're coding up an algorithm for class, think about how it could work for another problem that, say, an architect would want to solve. Ask friends how they'd change their job, how they like it, how it affects the industry, the country, the economy, culture, people's lives. If you wear your big-picture glasses often enough, your eyes will adjust. Then when you really need it, you'll just see it.
Fun fact: "Panorama" was coined in 1792 by Irish painter Robert Barker. His panoramas were displayed in a London building built specifically for viewing large panoramic paintings.
[1] General life/work advice: When to give up on your goals
[2] In the lean start-up: employ rapid hypothesis testing and incorporate customer feedback earlier so that your goals change function of demand
[3] In chess: you plan a global strategy instead of looking at a single corner of the board
[4] In cells in the body: in addition to proximate motifs that signal for a gene to "turn on", there are also key distal regulatory elements many, many bases upstream regulating expression
[5] In the environment: if you set adrift a piece of wood on one side of the ocean, it eventually makes it's way to the other side (Japanese Tsunami Debris Reaches Alaska Shores)
Another great story, often quoted in relation with business courses, thus resulting in its several versions, but most importantly as an interpretation of “seeing the big picture”, is Parable of the Three Stonecutters.
ReplyDeleteThis is a story about three stonecutters who were working in a quarry and asked what they were doing. The first stonecutter replied ‘I am cutting a stone’, the second said ‘I am cutting this block of stone to make sure that it’s square, and its dimensions are uniform, so that it will fit exactly in its place in a wall. The third stonecutter, who seems happiest of all three, answered “I am building a cathedral’.
Learning to see the bigger picture could be one step towards building our cathedral.