THE LONG VIEW (OR) BIG PICTURE THINKING – CHAPTER 01

Most people fall under either of the two main types of thinking paradigms- big picture or detail-oriented. The big picture thinker usually keeps coming up with ideas of what the ideal world would look like. The detail-oriented thinker on the other hand mostly thinks pragmatically and is organized.

A Story:

Around 1959 or 1960, Dashrath Manjhi, a laborer in India’s Gehlaur village lost his injured wife because the nearest hospital was about 45 minutes away. 22 years later, the same man had carved a 10-meter long path through the rocky ridge – all with a hammer and chisel – that chopped the travel time to 15 minutes.

Manjhi is an extreme example of seeing the big picture — instead of getting overwhelmed by the details of how he was going to get it done, he focused on the broader issue at hand: he didn’t want anyone else to suffer his wife’s fate. So, he worked tirelessly for years to prevent that from happening again.

What Is Big Picture Thinking?

Big picture thinking is the ability to grasp abstract concepts, ideas and possibilities. Big picture thinkers emphasize the system in which they are operating. This includes looking into various stakeholders such as customers, employees and investors but also competitors, social trends and future technological disruptions.

A big picture thinker is someone who mostly thinks of issues from a broader, overview-type perspective. When dealing with any project, they focus on the overall importance of the project and the major steps required to execute it. When big picture thinkers focus on details, they get tired easily. It’s the big picture that energizes and keeps them going. These types of people are often called visionaries or dreamers. They’re usually full of ideas, great at outlining how things could change, and what needs to be done to make the world a better place. Most inventors are big picture thinkers.

Imagine driving on the Howrah bridge at Calcutta (or any bridge). Do we look at the left and the right only? Hopefully not. We would have trained ourselves to cover both our left and right sides, as well as look far ahead in front of us. (If we only focused on a tiny word on the bumper sticker of the vehicle directly in front of us, we risk getting into an accident.) That’s essentially what big picture thinking is — looking at the entirety of a plan or situation.

Seeing the big picture means seeing the whole. The ability to comprehend the context of the matter and the system that is at work. We get to grips with the scope and focus on it, strategizing what will work and what will not. Put another way, big picture thinking is the ability to envision something.

In contrast, a detailed oriented person delves into the specifics of a project or process. In doing so, they may lose sight of the plan or the big picture. But, this does not mean that one thinking modality is right and another wrong. Instead, they are both necessary to function effectively.

The Importance Of Big Picture Thinking

“Take a step back”, “Look at the big picture”, “Think about it in the grand scheme of things”. These snippets of advice tend to go in one ear and out the other if we are naturally a detail-oriented person. Often, they can feel like a waste of time – why invest in all that fluffy thinking when there’s just so much to actually get done?

But scientific research has revealed that big picture thinking is linked to venture success for entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs are 30-48% more likely to think in broad terms than the rest of us. It is not easy to encourage big picture thinking. It takes a ton of work and mental reminders such as, “how will this matter to me in 3 days, 3 years, 3 decades…” 

We might be wondering, ‘what is the benefit of having a solid idea of the big picture?’ While both big picture vs detail-oriented thinking are crucial, they also complement each other. Zooming in on the details only can be a bit messy to deal with. By thinking big, we are less likely to fret over the details that won’t matter in the long run. Not to mention, a big picture person is likely to see how an obstacle impacts the big picture and how that can turn into an opportunity – a real plus if we are leading a team.

Both big picture thinking and detail thinking are important. Anyone who is prone to be in one or other mode by default will limit their ability to contribute to the whole picture.

Detail Oriented Or A Big Picture Thinker- The Difference

We can get a better understanding of big picture vs detail-oriented when we look at them as “universal versus specific thinking.” Some common words and phrases are:

One way to find out whether we are a big picture thinker or a specifics’ person is seeing what we tend to focus on naturally. Do we look at the detailed ins and outs of a project? 

Perhaps we give so many details in our reports that our manager finds it annoying?

Or, do we tend to keep a bird’s eye view on things, and feel frustrated when working on projects where we can’t see how it connects to a broader plan? When we look closely, we see that both types of thinking are needed in a workplace.

***To be continued in Chapter 02 (Identifying the Different Approaches, The Balance: Big Picture & Detailed Orientation- Components in Business, Strategies Towards a Big Picture Focus, Self Reflection- The Key) Link to Chapter -02:

THE LONG VIEW (OR) BIG PICTURE THINKING – CHAPTER 02

Content Curated By: Dr Shoury Kuttappa

SAYING NO: INTERTWINED BEHAVIORS

Not doing something will always be faster than doing it. The same philosophy applies in other areas of life. For example, there is no meeting that goes faster than not having a meeting at all.This is not to say we should never attend another meeting, but the truth is that we say yes to many things we do not actually want to do. There are many meetings held that do not need to be held.

How often do people ask you to do something and you just reply, “Yes, OK.” Three days later, you are overwhelmed by how much is on your to-do list. We become frustrated by our obligations even though we were the ones who said yes to them in the first place. It is worth asking if things are necessary. Many of them are not, and a simple “no” will be more productive than whatever work the most efficient person can muster. But if the benefits of saying no are so obvious, then why do we say yes so often?

Why We Say Yes

We agree to many requests not because we want to do them, but because we do not want to be seen as rude, arrogant, or unhelpful. Often, we have to consider saying no to someone we will interact with again in the future—our co-worker/ spouse/ family/ friends. Saying no to these people can be particularly difficult because we like them and want to support them. (Not to mention, we often need their help too.) Collaborating with others is an important element of life. The thought of straining the relationship outweighs the commitment of our time and energy.

For this reason, it can be helpful to be gracious in our response. Do whatever favours we can, and be warm-hearted and direct when we have to say no. But even after we have accounted for these social considerations, many of us still seem to do a poor job of managing the trade-off between yes and no. We find ourselves over-committed to things that do not meaningfully improve or support those around us, and certainly don’t improve our own lives. Perhaps one issue is how we think about the meaning of yes and no.

The Difference Between Yes and No: A Perspective

The words “yes” and “no” get used in comparison to each other so often that it feels like they carry equal weight in conversation. In reality, they are not just opposite in meaning, but of entirely different magnitudes in commitment. When we say no, we are only saying no to one option. When we say yes, we are saying no to every other option. Every time we say yes to a request, we are also saying no to anything else we might accomplish with the time.

Once we have committed to something, we have already decided how that future block of time will be spent.

The Role of No

Saying no is sometimes seen as a luxury that only those in power can afford. And it is true: turning down opportunities is easier when we can fall back on the safety net provided by power, money, and authority. But it is also true that saying no is not merely a privilege reserved for the successful among us. It is also a strategy that can help us become successful. Saying no is an important skill to develop at any stage of our career because it retains the most important asset in life: our time. If we do not protect our time, people will steal it from us.

We need to say no to whatever is not leading us toward our goals. We need to say no to distractions. If we broaden the definition as to how we apply no, it actually is the only productivity hack (as we ultimately say no to any distraction in order to be productive).

There is an important balance to strike here. Saying no does not mean we will never do anything interesting or innovative or spontaneous. It just means that we say yes in a focused way. Once we have knocked out the distractions, it can make sense to say yes to any opportunity that could potentially move us in the right direction. We may have to try many things to discover what works and what we enjoy.

Upgrading The No

Over time, as we continue to improve and succeed, our strategy needs to change.The opportunity cost of our time increases as we become more successful. At first, we just eliminate the obvious distractions and explore the rest. As our skills improve and we learn to separate what works from what does not, we have to continually increase our threshold for saying yes.

We still need to say no to distractions, but we also need to learn to say no to opportunities that were previously good uses of time, so we can make space for great uses of time. It is a good problem to have, but it can be a tough skill to master. In other words, we have to upgrade our “no’s” over time. Upgrading our no does not mean we will never say yes. It just means we default to saying no and only say yes when it really makes sense. The general trend seems to be something like this: If we can learn to say no to bad distractions, then eventually we will earn the right to say no to good opportunities.

How to Say No

Most of us are probably too quick to say yes and too slow to say no. It is worth asking ourselves where we fall on that spectrum. One trick is to ask, “If I had to do this today, would I agree to it?” It is not a bad rule of thumb, since any future commitment, no matter how far away it might be, will eventually become an imminent problem. If an opportunity is exciting enough to drop whatever we are doing right now, then it is a yes. If it is not, then perhaps we should think twice.

It is impossible to remember to ask ourselves these questions each time we face a decision, but it’s still a useful exercise to revisit from time to time. Saying no can be difficult, but it is often easier than the alternative. It is easier to avoid commitments than get out of them. Saying no keeps us toward the easier end of this spectrum. What is true about health is also true about productivity: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

The Power of No

More effort is wasted doing things that don’t matter than is wasted doing things inefficiently. And if that is the case, elimination is a more useful skill than optimization. Even worse, people will occasionally fight to do things that waste time. “Why can’t you just come to the meeting? We have it every week.” Just because it is scheduled weekly does not mean it is necessary weekly. We do not have to agree to something just because it exists.

Saying no to superiors at work can be particularly difficult. One approach could be to remind superiors what we would be neglecting if we said yes and force them to grapple with the trade-off (Data/ description and its impact on ongoing work). For example, if the manager asks to do X, we can respond with “Yes, I’m happy to make this the priority. Which of these other projects should I deprioritize to pay attention to this new project?”

Pointers to be aware of when saying No

Content Curated By: Dr Shoury Kuttappa

INVERSION AS A CRITICAL THINKING APPROACH: BEHAVIOURS ASSOCIATED

The ancient Stoic philosophers like Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus regularly conducted an exercise known as a premeditatio malorum, which translates to a “premeditation of evils.” The goal of this exercise was to envision the negative things that could happen in life. For example, the Stoics would imagine what it would be like to lose their job and become homeless or to suffer an injury and become paralyzed or to have their reputation ruined and lose their status in society.

The Stoics believed that by imagining the worst-case scenario ahead of time, they could overcome their fears of negative experiences and make better plans to prevent them. While most people were focused on how they could achieve success, the Stoics also considered how they would manage failure. This way of thinking, in which we consider the opposite of what we want, is known as inversion. It is a rare and crucial skill that nearly all great thinkers use to their advantage.

How Great Thinkers Shatter the Status Quo with Inversion

The German mathematician Carl Jacobi made a number of important contributions to different scientific fields during his career. In particular, he was known for his ability to solve hard problems by following a strategy of man muss immer umkehren or, loosely translated, “invert, always invert.” Jacobi believed that one of the best ways to clarify our thinking was to restate math problems in inverse form. He would write down the opposite of the problem he was trying to solve and found that the solution often came to him more easily.

Inversion Vs Reverse Engineering

The Inversion Thinking concept finds its roots in how mathematicians solve complex problems. Look at any problem backward and turn the situation upside down to find the solution. Also, it is not to be confused with reverse engineering.

In reverse engineering we work backward from an achieved solution. For example, if we want to achieve a target of 10 customers, we need to submit 30 proposals, then to give 30 proposals we have to prospect 100 customers and for that every day we should meet 5 customers. This is simple reverse engineering, reversing from a positive result. But in Inversion Thinking, we consider the opposite of what we want. What if the opposite was true? What if I focused on a different side of this situation?

Inversion is a powerful thinking tool because it puts a spotlight on errors and roadblocks that are not obvious at first glance. What if the opposite was true? What if I focused on a different side of this situation? Instead of asking how to do something, we ask how to not do it. Great thinkers, icons, and innovators think forward and backward. Occasionally, they drive their brain in reverse.

This way of thinking can reveal compelling opportunities for innovation. Art provides a good example. One of the biggest musical shifts in the last several decades came from Nirvana, a band that legitimized a whole new genre of music—alternative rock—and whose Nevermind album is memorialized in the Library of Congress as one of the most “culturally, historically or aesthetically important” sound recordings of the 20th century. Nirvana turned the conventions of mainstream rock and pop music completely upside down. Where hair metal was flashy, Nirvana was stripped-down and raw. Inversion is often at the core of great art.

At any given time there is a status quo in society and the artists and innovators who stand out are often the ones who overturn the standard in a compelling way. In a way, the secret to unconventional thinking is just inverting the status quo. This strategy works equally well for other creative pursuits like writing. Many great headlines and titles use the power of inversion to up-end common assumptions.

Success is Overvalued. Avoiding Failure Matters More. This type of inverse logic can be extended to many areas of life. Avoiding mistakes is an under-appreciated way to improve. In most jobs, you can enjoy some degree of success simply by being proactive and reliable—even if you are not particularly smart, fast, or talented in a given area. Sometimes it is more important to consider why people fail in life than why they succeed.

The Benefits of Thinking Forward and Backward

Inversion can be particularly useful in the workplace. Leaders can ask themselves, “What would someone do each day if they were a terrible manager?” Good leaders would likely avoid those things. Similarly, if innovation is a core piece of the business model, we can ask, “How could we make this company less innovative?” Eliminating those barriers and obstacles might help creative ideas arise more quickly. And every marketing department wants to attract new business, but it might be useful to ask, “What would alienate our core customer?” A different point of view can reveal surprising insights. We can learn just as much from identifying what doesn’t work as we can from spotting what does. What are the mistakes, errors, and flubs that we want to avoid? Inversion is not about finding good advice, but rather about finding anti-advice. It teaches us what to avoid.

Some more ways in which inversion can come into play in work and life:

Project Management: . . . . . Failure Premortem. Imagine the most important goal or project we are working on right now. Now fast forward six months and assume the project or goal has failed. Tell the story of how it happened. What went wrong? What mistakes did we make? How did it fail? In other words, think of the main goal and ask, “What could cause this to go horribly wrong?” This strategy is sometimes called the “kill the company” exercise in organizations because the goal is to spell out the exact ways the company could fail. Just like a Premeditation of Evils, the idea is to identify challenges and points of failure so you can develop a plan to prevent them ahead of time.

Productivity: . . . . .. . Most people want to get more done in less time. Applying inversion to productivity we could ask, “What if I wanted to decrease my focus? How do I end up distracted?” The answer to that question may help us discover interruptions we can eliminate to free up more time and energy each day. This strategy is not only effective, but often safer than chasing success. This insight reveals a more general principle: Blindly chasing success can have severe consequences, but preventing failure usually carries very little risk.

Decluttering: . . . . . . . . Marie Kondo, author of the blockbuster best-seller The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, uses inversion to help people declutter their homes. Her famous line is, “We should be choosing what we want to keep, not what we want to get rid of.” In other words, the default should be to give anything away that does not “spark joy” in our life. This shift in mindset inverts decluttering by focusing on what you want to keep rather than what you want to discard.

Relationships: . . . . . . . . .. . . . . What behaviors might ruin a marriage? Lack of trust. Not respecting the other person. Not letting each person have time to be an individual. Spending all of the time on kids and not investing in the relationship together. Not having open communication about money and spending habits. Inverting a good marriage can show us how to avoid a bad one.

Personal Finance: . . . . . . . . .. . . . .Everyone wants to make more money. But what if you inverted the problem? How could you destroy your financial health? Spending more than we earn is a proven path to financial failure. It doesn’t matter how much money we have, the math will never work out over time. Similarly, accumulating debt is a hair-on-fire emergency to be resolved as quickly as possible. And gradually creeping into unchecked shopping and spending habits can lead to self-inflicted financial stress.

Consider the Opposite

Inversion is counterintuitive. It is not obvious to spend time thinking about the opposite of what you want. And yet inversion is a key tool of many great thinkers. Stoic practitioners visualize negative outcomes. Ground-breaking artists invert the status quo. Effective leaders avoid the mistakes that prevent success just as much as they chase the skills that accelerate it.

Inversion can be particularly useful for challenging our own beliefs. It forces us to treat our decisions like a court of law. In court, the jury has to listen to both sides of the argument before making up their mind. Inversion helps to do something similar. What if the evidence disconfirmed what we believe? What if we tried to destroy the views that we cherish? Inversion prevents us from making up our mind after our first conclusion. Some more examples of Inversion Thinking Questions may be:

It is a way to counteract the gravitational pull of confirmation bias. Inversion is an essential skill for leading a logical and rational life. It allows us to step outside our normal patterns of thought and see situations from a different angle. Inversion is different than working backward or “beginning with the end in mind.” Those strategies keep the same goal and approach it from a different direction. Meanwhile, inversion asks you to consider the opposite of your desired result.

Content Curated By: Dr Shoury Kuttappa.