005 Culture Solution: Big Pictures

we are better at bigger pictures and that's very good news

In a recent interview, the British playwright Alan Bennett talked about the school plays he used to act in as a boy.

He would learn his lines but not bother learning the plot. On stage, the play would whirl around him, pretty much a mystery. He says he’s still not sure what happens in the Taming of the Shrew.

As we get older, we seek a bigger picture than a school boy. We learn our lines and something about the rest of the world around us, the community, the economy, the profession, we occupy. We become more worldly.

Until recently this was enough for a lot of people. All they really cared about was a rough idea of the world around them. A big picture, though? That was for oddballs and the compulsively curious.

This meant living in a silo. Theodore Levitt asked “what business are you in?” The answer seemed simple enough. We said “railroads” only to discover that this made Professor Levitt very cross. “No,” said Levitt, “you are in the transportation business.” We were being asked to climb up out of our silos and to use that new vantage point to see the larger landscape. Capitalism was getting brainier. It was seeking bigger pictures.

A generalizing intelligence began to form and spread. Now we didn’t have to spend a career in the pulp and paper business to succeed in the pulp and paper business. (There could be many reasons NOT to enter it but intellectual acumen and capital was no longer the barrier it used to be.) Now we were in possession of a strategic and practical gift that allowed us to turn our hand even to this. Increasingly, everyone had a McKinseyesque gift for turning any new world into terra cognito, a knowable world.

Then came the digital era. Now, as Andreessen puts it, software was eating the world. And this meant that we could build bigger, better models. We could expect more and better data. We could listen and react more adroitly. The digital era threw off big pictures as a matter of course. Even if the likes of Mark Zuckerberg couldn’t quite figure out which big picture to build.

Big pictures are a change that makes for change.

Now we can see “for miles in all directions.” We are getting better at complexity. We can grasp a vista consisting of parts, wholes, processes, systems, tensions, contradictions, pasts, futures, the likelihood of persistence and change in the short term and the long, and, most of all, if we’re really working it, we can see the assumptions and concepts with which we see.

Some of the requirements for building better big pictures are falling into place. We are creating ecosystems, a veritable culture of innovation.

But we need to get better still at conceptualizing, visualizing and testing them.

We should expect architects and engineers to get involved. Bigger pictures should eventually give birth to a profession of specialists. These could look like McKinsey consultants, but these people leave so much out of the problem-set that I find it hard to think of them as big picture experts. There was a moment when “design thinking” looked precisely like the profession that would be good at big pictures. Here too a partial view of things hobbles ambition and keeps big pictures small.

But most important we need to put our big picture capability to work on the problems that now haunt us. Most of these problems are systemic. Their causes are deep and multiple. FTL, our 001, for instance, has lots of moving parts. That means we need to begin by seeing everything at once. Big pictures give us this capacity. But we will need to build them better (not back) to get the job done.

Summing up

This newsletter is dedicated to a big picture of the cultural events and forces at work in our world.

When we take this larger view, we can see a culture that fails to mature its young. Call this the “rites of passage” problem (001). We see the decline of “vibe shifts.” Call this a “failure to adapt” problem (002). We see the decline of sharing and cultural calibration that once came from water coolers and tent poles (004).

But we also see the rise of gifts that can help us manage the confusion and disarray of American culture. So far we have talked about two of these: the rise of fluidity (003) and, today, big pictures (005).

It’s a foot race. Our problems have the lead. Our solutions are sprinting to catch up. Who wins? The bigger picture, the one we have painted so far, of an American culture in distress, does not lean towards optimism. And time is running out. Still, something is stirring. We are rousing ourselves from an intellectual slumber that assumed that “things would take care of themselves.”

This newsletter says, “Whatever else we do, let’s be sure to fix the culture part of the problem.”