Why is big picture thinking so important?

[SS10]

If reality is infinite, why is it so important to see the bigger picture? Wouldn't there always be a bigger picture? Couldn't the bigger picture always become recontextualised?

I am writing an article on 'big picture' thinking for my university project and I have hit a brick wall on why big picture thinking is so important.

[LastThursday]

Big picture thinking allows you to connect lots of smaller things together. It's like zooming out on Google Earth. You get a real feel for how things interrelate and fit together, how Africa relates to Europe relates to Asia, oh and America North and South. You realise there's more water than land. It automatically recontextualises the finer detail.

It's a very useful skill to be able to approach understanding from many different levels of zoom, especially in this day and age of narrow specialisation.

What's the bigger picture of your university project?

[Osaid]

Big picture thinking is less limited than small picture thinking, because it includes more of reality. If your thinking is not holistic, then as a result, your understanding is not holistic. Consequently, you end up with a more myopic view of reality and what is actually happening in reality, and this will translate into the things you do.

For example, you could take a painkiller to combat your headache, but that by itself is a very myopic solution because it ignores what is actually causing the headaches. All it does is suppress the symptoms of the cause. This leaves you endlessly experiencing headaches and buying painkillers. A more holistic approach would be to find out what is actually causing the headache and removing it directly. This removes the headaches and also the need for painkillers. You can go even further and ask yourself: What sort of side effects do these painkillers actually have? What do these painkillers actually do to my body, at a more scientific level? and etc.

There's so many examples of situations like the one above you can find in every day life, just gotta start being more cognizant of it.

[Carl-Richard]

2 hours ago, SS10 said:

Couldn't the bigger picture always become recontextualised?

Being aware of recontextualization is one example of big picture thinking, so you're already doing it. The more you zoom out to the bigger picture, the more complex things become, and the less black-and-white it becomes. Thinking big picture is about having the courage to detach yourself from the safe, simplistic, tried-and-tested models and accept uncertainty. It's about going from analysis to synthesis, fragmentation to integration, singular to plural, dichotomy to gradation.

Why it is important is because it can solve the problem of getting stuck in one way of seeing things, making you able to see outside of that perspective and seek correspondance with adjacent perspectives. It's about being flexible and being able to jump between different modes of thinking, cross-test different solutions, create hybrids or innovate completely new methods. It's highly linked to the Big 5 trait of Openness, creativity, low latent inhibition, thought connectivity etc. Basically all the revolutionary thinkers and theorists from history were gifted big picture thinkers.

Edited August 5, 2021 by Carl-Richard

[SS10]

42 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

Being aware of recontextualization is one example of big picture thinking, so you're already doing it. The more you zoom out to the bigger picture, the more complex things become, and the less black-and-white it becomes. Thinking big picture is about having the courage to detach yourself from the safe, simplistic, tried-and-tested models and accept uncertainty. It's about going from analysis to synthesis, fragmentation to integration, singular to plural, dichotomy to gradation.

Why it is important is because it can solve the problem of getting stuck in one way of seeing things, making you able to see outside of that perspective and seek correspondance with adjacent perspectives. It's about being flexible and being able to jump between different modes of thinking, cross-test different solutions, create hybrids or innovate completely new methods. It's highly linked to the Big 5 trait of Openness, creativity, low latent inhibition, thought connectivity etc. Basically all the revolutionary thinkers and theorists from history were gifted big picture thinkers.

@Carl-Richard I like this! Good insight. The big picture encompasses the small fragments. Is it about creating links between the partitions within the bigger picture? Then that bigger picture itself is a partition of a larger picture? Seems endless.

[Carl-Richard]

41 minutes ago, SS10 said:

@Carl-Richard I like this! Good insight. The big picture encompasses the small fragments. Is it about creating links between the partitions within the bigger picture? Then that bigger picture itself is a partition of a larger picture? Seems endless.

Yes. However, the key with the bigger picture is that it's not "just" an additive summation of the smaller parts. The "links" so to speak between each part can be conceptualized like this:

Each part exist in an environment where they influence eachother and their environment in a non-linear, non-reducible fashion (interactively and transactionally). You can't just look at each part individually to determine the nature of the entire system, because each part is tightly interconnected with each other part. This is the basic idea behind complex systems theory which is tightly connected to big picture thinking: it's that synthesis is not immediately reducible to analysis and vice versa. There is a dialectical relationship between the two: from lower-order phenomena emerges higher-order phenomena.

In other words, emergence is the piece of the equation that is not accounted for by the additive summation of each part. It's like when hydrogen and oxygen bond to form water. H2O is not simply a mix of the chemical properties of H and O. H2O has its own chemical properties. There is something "new" there that is created, and that is emergence. You cannot reduce the explanation of a whole (water) to its parts in isolation (H and O), and this is true for all of reality on all scales (hence why you need holism to understand reality as a whole).

Edited August 5, 2021 by Carl-Richard