Understanding the Little Picture

I have been in a lot of meetings and planning sessions where the focus was on understanding the big picture.  Where will we be in a year, three years, five years?  What kind of company do we want to be?  What are the products we want to sell?  How do these five things relate to these other 5 things?  In my consulting work, I spend a lot of time with clients talking about the big picture, whether for a particular project or for the company itself.  Everyone likes talking about it, because we all like to envision the grand and glorious future.

What I have found is that very few people are really good at understanding the little picture.  There is a lot of discipline in being able to carve out a piece of the big picture and saying “I have to get this done today or this week in order to deliver on the big picture.”  I am not talking about project management and Gantt charts and all of that level of planning.  I am talking about the ability to just think about the small picture and decide on the right course of action, without eliminating options down the road on the big picture.

The reason this is so vitally important, in my view, is that the big picture is changing far too rapidly to know what it’s going to look like when you get there.  Whether it’s external or internal forces driving the change, it’s almost a certainty that the current path will wind up somewhere different.  Being able to shed irrelevant details is very, very difficult.

I was thinking about this as I listened to a podcast from Radio Lab on A 4-Track Mind. The story is about Bob Milne, a man that can play four pieces of music in his head at the same time, and know exactly where he is at any time in each of them.  When asked how he was able to hear the cacophony of music, he talked about his ability isolate each piece of music as it’s own orchestra, and furthermore zoom in on a particular instrument within that orchestra.  It is a great story and worth a listen.  While Bob knows and understands the big picture, he can also focus down to the littlest part of the picture.  I can imagine that when Beethoven was writing symphonies, he could hear the entire orchestra playing together, even though he was only writing the violin parts.

It’s quite difficult to say, in front of a group of peers or a client, “I don’t know the answer to that question yet, but we don’t need to solve it now.  We will solve that when we come to it.”  The small price paid in ego is worth freeing up the resources to simply getting moving on the little picture.

Do you get bogged down in a lot of big picture discussions that have no small picture execution?  If so, how do you navigate it?