Models of big picture thinking

Nine named frameworks, almost all of them written before AI existed, and only three that tell you what to do rather than how to picture it. This page is the map of the territory, graded the way this research grades studies: what each establishes, what it does not, and whether it is a method or a vocabulary.

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The altitude family#

Zoom in, zoom out. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business Review, 2011. Leaders operate along a continuum between a close view where relationships and particulars dominate and a distant view where patterns and principles do. The failure she names is getting stuck at either end, which she calls trained incapacity, and she is explicit that neither end is the right one. Vocabulary, not method: no test, no procedure, no instrument.

The three altitudes of leadership. Ian Woodward at INSEAD, 2017, developed with Ram Charan. Fifty thousand feet for the strategic panorama, fifty feet for planning and execution, five feet for self-awareness, with effective leaders moving between all three. He names the pathology altitude sickness and states that around 70 per cent of senior executives display it, most often trapped at fifty feet. No study, sample or measurement is cited for that figure anywhere in the article. This is the closest existing relative to the Altitude Lens and it is worth knowing before anybody points it out.

The balcony and the dance floor. Ronald Heifetz, Harvard, 1994, developed in the adaptive leadership work of 2009. Step off the floor to see the pattern, then return to act in it, and the discipline is the movement rather than a preference for either. The oldest of the three and the one that most clearly makes perspective a temporary act rather than a position.

Zoom out, zoom in in the Govindarajan sense, productised by Deloitte as a planning method: a twenty-year view followed by six to twelve month bets. A procedure, and a planning procedure rather than a thinking one.

The systems family#

Leverage points. Donella Meadows, 1997 and 1999. Twelve kinds of intervention ranked by how much they move a system, from parameters at the weakest through goals to the paradigm the system arises from and the capacity to hold paradigms lightly. This is the canonical answer to which level to act at, and Meadows says in the essay itself that the ordering is not precise and that leverage points are counter-intuitive and routinely pushed in the wrong direction. A method, and the strongest single item in this territory. See leverage points.

Systems thinking. Peter Senge, 1990, as the discipline that integrates the others, building on Russell Ackoff's argument that a system is explained by the whole that contains it rather than by taking it apart. Vocabulary of enormous influence, and an unusually thin record of tested application.

Cynefin. Dave Snowden, with Mary Boone in Harvard Business Review in 2007. Sorts a situation into simple, complicated, complex or chaotic before you choose how to act, and names the characteristic error as applying one domain's practice in another, usually treating a complex situation as merely complicated. A method, and the nearest existing thing to a device for selecting a mode rather than a level.

The strategy family#

Scenario planning. Pierre Wack at Royal Dutch Shell, Harvard Business Review, 1985. Its stated purpose was changing managers' mental models rather than predicting outcomes. A method with an output, and the widely repeated claim that Shell outperformed competitors through it comes from the people who ran the scenarios and has never been benchmarked. See scenario planning.

Good strategy, bad strategy. Richard Rumelt, 2011. Diagnosis, guiding policy, coherent action, with bad strategy identified as fluff and as goals mistaken for strategy. Its relevance here is the diagnosis step, which is an altitude choice by another name.

Integrative thinking. Roger Martin, 2007. Holding two opposing models at once and generating a third that contains what is good in both. Vocabulary, and a demanding one.

Method or vocabulary#

Three give a procedure: Meadows ranks where to intervene, Cynefin sorts the situation before you act, scenario planning has steps and an output. Kanter, Woodward, Heifetz, Senge, Ackoff, Rumelt and Martin give a picture and a name for the failure. That is not a criticism; a good name for a failure is worth having and several of these have shaped how a generation of leaders talks. It does mean that a reader who wants to know what to do on Tuesday is served by three of the nine.

What none of them address#

Every framework here was written for a world in which reaching another altitude took effort. Getting to the pattern meant time and analysis; getting to the twenty-year view meant a scenario exercise with a budget. So the failure each of them describes is an inability to get there: stuck at fifty feet, trained incapacity, never leaving the dance floor.

That constraint has gone. Dashboards render the detail, forecasts produce the horizon, and a model will generate the pattern in seconds. The failure that follows is not an inability to reach another level but the absence of anything forcing a choice between them, which is a different diagnosis with a different remedy. It is set out at altitude lock, and the argument for why it matters now is at big picture thinking in the age of AI.

What this page does not establish#

None of the nine has outcome evidence behind it. Every one is argued from observation, case analysis or practice, and this territory has nothing resembling the experimental base that exists for calibration or for debriefs. The grading here is of what each framework claims and on what basis, not of whether it works, because for none of them is that known.

Key sources

• Kanter, R. M. (2011). Managing yourself: zoom in, zoom out. Harvard Business Review.
• Woodward, I. C. with Charan, R. (2017). The three altitudes of leadership. INSEAD Knowledge.
• Heifetz, R. A. (1994). Leadership Without Easy Answers. Harvard University Press.
• Meadows, D. H. (1999). Leverage points: places to intervene in a system.
• Snowden, D. J. and Boone, M. E. (2007). A leader's framework for decision making. Harvard Business Review.
• Wack, P. (1985). Scenarios: uncharted waters ahead. Harvard Business Review.

Related SuperSkills research#

• The Altitude Lens
• Big Picture Thinking
• Models of judgement