Seeing the Forest AND the Trees

Well, hello! I know, I don't write here very much do I? Well, hopefully that will begin to change as I continue to read and learn and think.


So we've all heard the adage "Learn to see the forest through the trees" talking about seeing the "big picture" things in life. Well, I've been reading a few different things recently that have really challenged my strong belief in this phrase. I love trying to see the big picture in things, don't get me wrong. What I've been reading and observing recently however is that the big picture we often get is only a compilation of small picture problems. What we need to learn is to see the multiple small picture things and how they are all interconnected! It isn't enough to say these things are connected... we need to be able to fully see the deeper connections that are usually easily dismissed. A lot of the "big picture" things we see are simply symptoms of what is occuring underneath everything.

So what have I been reading that got me thinking about this? Well, I began reading The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization by Peter Senge and just recently picked up the June 2007 release of Harvard Business Review because of an article entitled How Successful Leaders Think.
I'm just going to post a few quotes here from both to show what has been impressed on me so far.


In his introduction to the Revised version of Fifth Discipline, Senge quotes a few very useful quotes from Dr. W. Edwards Deming:

"Our prevailing system of management has destroyed our people. People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-respect, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning. The forces of destruction begin with toddlers - a prize for the best Halloween costume, grades in school, gold stars - and on up through the university. On the job, people, teams, and dicisions are ranked, reward for the top, punishment for the bottom. Management by Objectives, quotas, incentive pay, business pans, put together separately, division by division, cause further loss, unknown and unreasonable."

"We will never transform the prevailing system on management without transforming our prevailing sytem of education. They are the same system."
"The relationship between a boss and subordinate is the same as the relationship between a teacher and student... The teacher sets the aims, the student responds to those aims. The teacher has the answer, the student workds to get the answer. Students know when they have succeeded because the teacher tells them. By the time all children are 10 then know what it takes to get ahead in school and please the teacher - a lessong the carry forward through their careers of 'pleasing bosses and failing to improve the system that serves customers."


This is really challenging... but following it up with what Roger Martin says in the HBR article is really intriguing.

"We often don't know what to do with fundamentally opposing models. Our first impulse is usually to determine which is 'right' and, by the process of elimination, which is 'wrong'."

The part of the article that I would like to talk about is a little too long to quote here, so I'll just sumarize it. Basically it says that we as humans have been gifted by God with opposable minds. Like the opposable thumb, this allows us to come up with creative solutions to problems. It allows us to hold multiple opposing ideas in our heads at once and somehow come up with a solution that combines the best of both. It is a gift that has allowed us to leap ahead in innovation, but with the problems described by Deming, it is not being excercised. In fact, it has gotten to the point that in order to see the "big picture", we have to break our problems apart into small pieces. This leads to an interesting problem according to Senge.

"From a very early age, we are taught to break apart problems, to fragment the world. This apparently makes complex tasks and subjects more manageable, but we pay a hidden enormous price. We can no longer see the consequences of our actions; we lose our intrinsic sense of connection to a larger whole. When we then try to 'see the big picture,' we try to reassemble the fragments in our minds, to list and organize all the pieces. But as physicist David Bohm says, the task is futile - similar to trying to reassemble the fragments of a breken mirror to see a true reflection. Thus, after a while, we give up trying to see the whole altogether."

So, the challenge presented by Senge is to not break things apart first. It is to learn to see the deeper things that cause the symptoms that are easily observable in life. Seeing the forest AND the trees. In order to fully see the big picture, we must see the underlying currents that connect the small picture things clearly so that we can fully understand the small picture things. Not exactly what's common these days is it? Well, I have been trying to get this skill in use recently. I don't have any obvious examples of how it's worked so far, but it is difficult to do. It's really interesting when you are able to see the deeper currents that lead everything together.

So that's my random thoughts here. I'm also going to be posting a rant type thing that I wrote a couple months back on another book I was reading.