Seeing the Whole and its Parts All At Once

A recent blog over at Leadership Now on integrative thinking caught my eye. First, when 92%of executives feel that the challenges they are facing are more complex than ever before it suggests a different approach is required. Steve Roesler's quote over at All Things Workplace, "Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; what we really want is for things to remain the same but get better." -Sidney Harris, pretty much says it all when it comes to recognizing that to make a move, you have to make a move.

Secondly, integrative thinking, as noted at Leadership Now, is about recognizing that it is possible to see the parts and the whole simultaneously without bursting a brain fuse. For some people this comes naturally; for others it must be developed. The delightful aspect of that reality is that no matter what, it requires an expansion of how many ways there are of thinking about any given situation.

The fact that things are more complex creates a wonderful gateway for understanding just how you do think and when the boundaries are feeling pushed. This is typically the spot where rebound takes place, back to that safe place where everything was separated into its nice neat piles with clear demarcation lines. That road inevitably leads back to the tempation to simplify by falling back into rote and reliable thinking patterns that frankly, are not effective when the going gets more complex.

Seeing the big picture and its component parts simultaneously demands more advanced skills to see into the situation, using intuitive insight residing in everyone, and then working with the ability to visualize, also innate to all. The joke is you can't get there from here, where here means relying on the thought patterns and love to sort and catalog.

The first step is to know where logical analysis has become more dominant over intuitive insight. The second step is to know what you trust. When those two are clear, so are the options and a whole new field of choice.