Nazca Lines and “Big Picture” thinking

When History meets Psychology

In Cognitive Psychology, one way to describe thinking styles is to oppose reductionist and holistic approaches.

Reductionist thinking is when we create our opinion looking at only a small portion of the situation. Most of the time, we don’t have enough information to decide. Nobel Prize winner in Economics Herbert Simon called it “bounded rationality”. So, we elaborate our plan by “thin-slicing”. “Thin-slicing” means judging without knowing everything. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book, Blink, explained the process and it has proven successfull to some extent. Daniel Kahneman, another Nobel Prize winner in Economics called it “Intuition” or “System 1”. System 1 is fast whereas System 2 is slow and analytic. Most of the time, we don’t think about how and when to use our cognitive systems! We do it instinctively. For example, when driving, we turn and avoid other vehicles using System 1. We don’t think twice otherwise we'd bump into other vehicles. But at the same time, we can be thinking about our business strategy the entire time we were driving. The two systems can work concurrently. But understanding "Big Picture" thinking can help.

Let’s now use the allegory of the Nazca Lines. The Nazca Lines are a fascinating mystery. They are geoglyphs – gigantic pictures of animals on the ground of Peru. There’s a monkey, a bird, a spider, even an astronaut... But the reason why they are so famous is that you can’t see them from the ground. If you’re walking on one those gigantic drawings, you may not even know it. But if you fly above them, in an airplane for example, you’ll see them.
The way these drawings were made was by removing the top-layer rocks creating lines by showing lower layers of lighter-colored sand. The Nazca lines are said to have been made during a time that spans of over a millenium, between the 4th century BC until the 10th century BC. But we still don’t really know the reason why those geoglyphs were made.

Of course, this is only an allegory for “Big Picture” thinking. So, how could we use it in our everyday life? How do we draw the “Nazca Lines of our business”?

Let’s use the example of Porter’s 5 forces. It’s pictured this way on wikipedia:

Porter's 5 forces are competitors, the bargaining power of buyers and suppliers, and the threats of new entrants and substitute products. You'll get a good picture of your business by applying the analysis of those 5 forces upon your reality.

APPLYING ANALYTIC THINKING UPON REALITY.

In the future, we will wear high-tech glasses with which we'll choose through which types of lenses we want to understand reality.

In Howard Gardner’s book Five Minds for the Future, he suggests that synthetic thinking is one of the 5 key skills of the 21st century along with discipline, creativity, ethics and respect. There are many ways to describe synthetic thinking like “Big Picture” thinking, “systemic” thinking or holistic thinking.

One great philosopher who reflected upon the topic is Georg Friedrich Hegel. One of his suggestion is a thinking based on a triangular relation between thesis, antithesis and synthesis, in which each element of the triad is composed itself of a sub-triad. This composition forces us to develop an opinion on at least of 9 elements. But each element at each level of the Hegelian triad could also be linked to each other in a 3D way like a fractal or for example like the Sierpinski triangle.