ACQUIRE THE WISDOM OF BIG-PICTURE THINKING
If someone told you that on the longest day of the year you would be able to look deep into an
old-fashioned well and see the sun reflected in the water, what would you think?
Would you consider that an interesting but useless piece of trivia?
Would you think the person who noticed the reflection needed to get a life?
Or would it stir ideas that would challenge your paradigm about the world?
The Big Picture is a ball
An Egyptian librarian heard that bit of information - that the sun could be seen shining at the
bottom of a well in the town of Syene - and he considered it more than mere trivia. That detail
about the well started this big picture thinker thinking.
He surmised that if it made a reflection in a well, the sun must be directly overhead. And if it
were directly overhead, then it would cast no shadows from upright columns or posts. Yet, on
the longest day of the year in the city of Alexandria, where he lived, he observed that straight
columns did cast shadows.
As a good scientist and thinker, he decided to travel 800 kilometres to Syene to verify that what
he had heard was true. On the longest day of the year, he looked into the well and saw the sun
reflected. And sure enough, at midday, posts cast no shadows. So he began thinking. After a
while, he started to see a bigger picture of what these seemingly insignificant facts meant.
Surprisingly, it went against what nearly everyone believed at the time. You see, the librarian's
name was Eratosthenes and he lived more than 2 200 years ago.
As the director of the greatest library in the world (the library of Alexandria in Egypt was said to
possess hundreds of thousands of scrolls), he was at the intellectual capital of the planet. In
the third century B.C., nearly every scholar in Alexandria and around the world believed the
earth to be flat, but Eratosthenes reasoned that if the sun's light came down straight and the
earth was flat, then there would be no shadows in either location. If there were shadows in one
location but not the other, then there could be only one logical explanation. The surface of the
earth must be curved. In other words, the world must be a sphere.
That's a pretty impressive mental leap, although it seems perfectly logical today. After all, we've
seen pictures of our planet from space but Eratosthenes made that big picture connection by
using everyday facts and putting them together. Even more impressive, he took it one step
further. He actually calculated the size of the earth!
Using basic trigonometry, he measured the angle of the shadows: approximately 7.12 degrees,
about 1/50th of a circle. Then he reasoned that if the distance between Syene (modern-day
Aswan) and Alexandria was 800 kilometres (using our standards of measurement), then the
earth must be around 40 000 kilometres in circumference (50 x 800 kilometres).
He wasn't far off: the actual circumference of the earth through the poles is 40 008 kilometres.
Not bad for a guy who had nothing but his brain and a big picture mindset to figure the whole
thing out!
In the actions of Eratosthenes, you can see the truth of a statement made centuries later by
German statesman, Konrad Adenauer: "We all live under the same sky, but we don't all
have the same horizon."
How many thousands of people had seen what Eratosthenes saw and never made the same
connection? How many hundreds of his fellow mathematicians saw the same shadows he did
and failed to see the big picture? Eratosthenes wasn't even the most talented mathematician
of his day. His peers called him beta and pentathlos, which is kind of like calling him Mr Second
Place. However, that didn't matter. Though he wasn't the top man in any discipline, he could
see - and think - big picture.
That's the reason his name is remembered today.
Using that ability, he not only calculated the circumference of the earth, but he also
accurately sketched the route of the Nile River, worked out a calendar that included leap
years and estimated the earth's distance from the sun and moon.
Eratosthenes certainly didn't get caught up in the trees and miss the forest. In fact, his
perspective was so good that he saw not only the forest, but also the river that flowed into it,
the planet that contained them and parts of the solar system to which the planet belonged!
The Mindset of BIG PICTURE thinkers
You don't have to be a scientist or mathematician to embrace big-picture thinking or to benefit
from it. It can help any person in any profession.
When someone like Jack Welch tells a GE employee that the ongoing relationship with
the customer is more important than the sale of an individual product, he's reminding
them of the big picture.
Real estate developer, Donald Trump quipped, "You have to think anyway, so why not think
big?"
Big picture thinking brings wholeness and maturity to a person's thinking. It brings perspective.
It's like making the frame of a picture bigger, in the process, expanding not only what you can
see, but what you are able to do. (Source: Dr John C Maxwell: Thinking for a Change: 11 Ways
highly successful people approach life and work: 2003: 60-62)
In our Strategic Forum we
continuously
emphasise
the
importance of Big Picture thinking.
We have variously referred to it as
Breaking the Silo Paradigm and
Boundaryless thinking. We have
always promoted the idea that
CONTEXT is all important because
if the context is well understood,
strategising
becomes
more
relevant and powerful. In support of
this philosophy we monitor 13
environments in the larger building, construction- and property –
industry environments and we
regularly invite outside experts to
provide us with thought provoking and mind-set challenging inputs. As stated by Thomas
Friedman “. . . the world is a web, in which adjustments made here are bound to have effects
over there - everything is interconnected. Without some awareness of the whole, without some
sense of how means converge to accomplish or frustrate ends- there can be no strategy. AND
WITHOUT STRATEGY, THERE IS ONLY DRIFT. (Thomas Friedman: The Lexus and the Olive
Tree: 2000)
At our BMI Strategic Forum we
have
always
pursued
BIG
PICTURE THINKING by ascribing
to a paradigm of sharing all
information with our subscribers
on the premise that knowledge
must be freely shared and
empowering. We provide regular
Sensemaking
Reports,
Powerpoint presentations and
Xcell spread-sheets. Accordingly
we developed an improved
information management system
to facilitate the process.
From the outset we developed our
website (www.strategicforum) to detect and make sense of early signs of change in the industry
within a scenario context, whilst monitoring and analysing the published data to confirm
emerging trends. In this regard we urge you to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and
Slideshare, because it is here that we alert you to important Political, Economic, Social and
Industry trends.
We developed an extensive database arranged in 7 Dashboards, cross-linked by means of
macros to facilitate easy and efficient navigation within and between the Dashboards.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
BPP by Province Dashboard;
BC by Province Dashboard;
Building Industry Dashboard;
Gross Fixed Capital Formation (GFCF) Dashboard;
Mortgage Advances Dashboard;
Building Materials Dashboard;
Strategic Planning Dashboard
Navigation between Dashboards and to the individual Excel spread-sheets in each Dashboard
is at the click of a button. Each S/S is accompanied by all the Charts necessary to get a
complete view. The sheets and the Charts are accessible and can be copied and pasted. These
Dashboards are updated as information changes and posted on the website for downloading.
Advice of postings are on the default page of our website where a quick-link is provided which
takes subscribers directly to the web-site page, at which point a subscriber user name and
password is required for access.
We accept that the information is far too comprehensive for most companies, but we believe
that by sharing all information our clients are empowered to dig deep into the database if the
need presents itself, or to look at main conclusions and trends which we derive from our indepth analysis and deep knowledge of the industry. In order to facilitate ease of interpretation
we also developed unique visual analytic tools to present the information. This is based on
graphically representing and exploring data (in the short- and long-term future) in a way that
can bring clarity to executives’ concerns and to enable them to see and explore strategic
improvement opportunities. In this way we hope to contribute to the understanding of our clients
of the CONTEXT of the Industry and to develop competitive Industry foresight and Strategic
Leadership as a way of Business Life.
Dr.Llewellyn B Lewis,
Principal Consultant, BMI Building Research Strategy Consulting Unit cc,
[email protected] , www.strategicforum.co.za;
Tel: (011) 884 2075
Cell 082 884 0063