Paul Seabright, an economist at Toulouse University, has a particularly nice literary reference to highlight the difficulty of seeing the big-picture:

"If you read Tolstoy's War and Peace, he has some wonderful descriptions about how battles which look very clear to military historians never seem that way to the people involved in them, that when you're actually in the smoke and the roar of the cannons, you have no idea what's happening. Even the generals have no idea what's happening."

The quote is from a BBC website article by Michael Blastland, discussing the difficulties that politicians have in seeing 'the big picture', and how  (either as a cause, or an effect, or both) there is a political culture in which admissions of ignorance, ambiguity or confusion are taboo - something that Jake Chapman mentions in Systems Failure.

The article goes on: 

"Tolstoy intended these passages as a parable of society as a whole, to show there's no vantage point from which to get the big picture.

This also holds for the complicated financial systems currently under the spotlight worldwide.

We had become a little too confident that we thought we could see the big picture, and now the big picture has come back and hit us rather hard where it hurts."

What all this seems to point to, though, is the importance of trying to see the big picture, but acknowledging that unpredictability and surprises will always be in store; problems are then approached through the objective of managing this unpredictability. Indeed, seeing the big-picture, or trying to, should give us a better grasp of what kind of shocks might occur in the future. 

So, perhaps, big-picture thinking, but with humility, is the way to go.

New Comment