Why Great Leaders Embrace Broad Thinking — and How It Transforms Organizations What leaders think they know can cause narrowed thinking, limiting the ability to solve complex problems.
By Andrea Olson Edited by Micah Zimmerman
Key Takeaways
- Broad thinking helps leaders identify and address the right organizational challenges effectively.
- Considering the big picture prevents short-term decisions from causing long-term problems across departments.
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Managers are often promoted to senior roles based on their ability to fix problems. However, as enterprise leaders, they must focus less on solving problems and more on defining which problems the organization should be tackling.
This means having the willingness and patience to step back and ask, "What problem are we trying to solve?" They are stuck in problem-fixing mode. But it's not enough to simply apply effort; you must work on the right thing. One hour solving the right problem beats ten hours on the wrong one. This means accurately identifying and framing the problem, need or challenge.
Say you have an idea to help improve customer service — a new chatbot feature for the company website. But what aspects of customer service need to be improved?
What need would the chatbot fulfill? Is customer service even the issue, or is service lacking because of other failures across broader company operations, such as product flaws or outdated technology? You could easily blow thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours on a chatbot that does nothing to improve customer service because it's not relevant to the real problem.
Instead of considering interdependencies and broader patterns and exploring their implications, this approach views the problem as a one-off situation. So, we need to shift from this narrow thinking to broad thinking.
Broad thinking starts with employing three behaviors. First, spend time following your thoughts in an exploratory way rather than simply trying to find an answer or idea and moving on. Second, look at things from different angles and consider a wide range of options carefully before acting. Third, consistently consider the bigger picture and resist getting caught up in the smaller details.
Sure, it sounds simple. But it's much harder in practice. People naturally gravitate to action over inaction. It's almost an automatic response – an unchecked and often unvalidated impulse. Defaulting to the first idea that comes to mind and acting on it.
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Companies want action. They don't want employees sitting around wringing their hands, frozen with indecision. They also don't want employees overanalyzing decisions to the point of inertia. Therefore, they often train employees to make decisions faster and more efficiently.
However, decisions made for speed don't always make for great decisions. Especially seemingly simple ones that have larger downstream ramifications.
Consider something as easy as launching a promotional campaign to generate qualified leads. Simple! Let's go.
But let's say it's a booming success — like crazy good. So much so that the call center is overwhelmed and can't handle the influx. Leads go abandoned. Employees get stressed out. Your brand reputation takes a hit due to a lack of follow-through. Was it that simple of a decision to begin with?
Yeah, this isn't the typical case, but if the bigger picture was considered upon conception, adjustments could have been made in advance to prevent catastrophe.
Think this is just an implausible hypothetical? Well, during the 1980s, American Airlines created the AAirpass — an unlimited first-class flight membership that sold for a $250,000 flat rate. The idea seemed great, and it was incredibly popular. In fact, the sheer volume of flights taken by AAirpass holders led the company to lose millions of dollars almost immediately. When the company tried to cancel these memberships, they were sued by outraged customers. It went down in history as one of the costliest promotional failures ever.
Of course, broad thinking can't predict every possible outcome of an idea. But that's not the intent. It's to consider different perspectives and gain a broader understanding of an idea in context – in short, seeing the big picture.
If the campaign planners had considered how the promotion would impact other departments, they could have, for instance, designed an approach to dial things up or down, better controlling the response inflow.
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An interesting parable illustrates this using six blind men to describe an elephant. One feels a leg and says it is like a tree; another the tail and believes it to be like a rope. Yet another feels the body and thinks it's like a wall, while another feels the ears and believes it's like a fan. Number 5 feels a tusk and says it's like a spear, while number 6, feeling the trunk, believes it's like a snake. None have the complete picture, but all are partly correct.
Broad thinking considers the parts as being inseparable from the whole. The elephant parts are inseparable from the entire animal, just like the promotional campaign was inseparable from the other aspects of the organization it impacted.
When you broaden your perspective, you also become more sensitive to subtleties of differentiation: how elements that are seemingly irrelevant, extraneous, or opposites can interconnect.
For example, Liquid Death — basically a canned water company — applied broad thinking to craft a new way to position and promote its products.
It's hard to differentiate water. Water is water. And every other bottled water company – Dasani, SmartWater, Evian, Fiji -- focused on emphasizing things like mountain springs and electrolytes.
Liquid Death used broad thinking to create an entirely new approach to their messaging – rebellious, bold, heavy metal. They targeted a different segment of the market – not yoga moms, but young men who only might have drunk water at the gym. This helped them become a cult brand of legend. It's valued at $1.4 billion as of 2024. Yeah, not bad.
This is why broad thinking is essential for problem-solving, leadership and smart organizational strategy. A great strategy should be both evolving and consistent simultaneously. It needs to adapt to changing market conditions, consumer preferences and societal trends to remain relevant and competitive over time but also stay consistent with your organization's core behavioral principles and unique positioning.
Broad thinking enables you to simultaneously consider these two contradictory ideas and create tools for others to do the same.
