How To Embrace Big-Picture Thinking for Long-Term Success

For Michelle Razavi, cofounder of protein bar brand Elavi, setbacks felt personal until she learned to take a step back. “As business owners, we tend to be so emotionally attached,” she says on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. “This feels like an extension of us. But a lot of things are not personal. When handling rejection or obstacles, the best thing you can do is take a break, take a step back, and really try to look at the big picture.”

As founders juggle several tasks to keep their businesses operating, it can similarly be easy to lose sight of the end goal: Where is your company headed? What’s your mission statement? How can your business solve a meaningful problem for your customers?

The good news is you can develop big-picture thinking skills to answer these important questions. Here are a few strategies you can incorporate.

What is big-picture thinking?

Big-picture thinking is a strategic practice to evaluate and imagine long-term goals, concepts, and trends. Unlike detail-oriented thinking—which involves focused attention on specific aspects of a plan, like proofreading your brand’s social media posts—big-picture thinking takes larger considerations into account, like the long-term possibilities of a plan. For example, for your social media strategy, your broader goal might be to become your industry’s go-to source for interesting insights.

Entrepreneurs can use big-picture thinking to identify changing trends in their industry and create a future vision for their business. Big-picture thinking strategies can apply to a wide range of projects, like designing innovative products, building long-term relationships with business partners like suppliers, and crafting creative marketing campaigns.

An example of big-picture thinking

To define the brand persona for Heyday Canning, a modern canned goods company, founders Kat Kavner and Jaime Lynne Tulley looked at the big picture. “We did a lot of thinking around the brand’s mission and vision and what is the big-picture thing that we’re trying to accomplish here, until we got to a place where it felt like a really tight, cohesive vision,” Kat says on Shopify Masters. “From that, what emerged was this new brand that was going to be very joyful, vibrant, fun, and kind of vintage-y and retro but very forward-looking.”

Kat and Jaime were able to take this bigger picture idea and communicate their goals to their design partner, who helped them create their brand identity, logo, colors, and fonts. And although the brand is more established today, these ideas continue to guide how the cofounders run their company. For example, on social media, Heyday’s brand voice is enthusiastic and casual.

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Strategies for developing big-picture thinking

• Adopt a growth mindset
• Practice brainstorming techniques
• Define long-term SMART goals
• Expand your network

Here are a few strategies to consider practicing to develop big-picture thinking within your company:

Adopt a growth mindset

A growth mindset is the belief that you can improve your basic abilities and talents through learning and perseverance. “A growth mindset [is] about experimentation,” says Connie Steele, a consultant on the future of work and the author of Building the Business of You, on Shopify Masters. “It’s about testing, learning, and iterating.”

A growth mindset can help with your big-picture thinking by opening you up to new possibilities. For example, using social listening tools to look at feedback on your products or services on social media can help you make improvements so you can better serve your customers.

A few ways to embrace a growth mindset include:

• Reading about your industry
• Asking for feedback
• Considering setbacks as learning opportunities
• Embracing failure

Practice brainstorming techniques

Big-picture thinkers use various brainstorming techniques to evaluate the broader context and implications of ideas, including:

• Mind mapping.Mind mapping is a visual brainstorming technique that helps individuals or teams break down ideas into subtopics, grouping new ideas by category. For example, a company brainstorming new marketing campaigns could write big-picture ideas like “email marketing” and “affiliate marketing,” build out all of the potential campaign ideas associated with each type, and use the diagram to assess the viability and potential of each option.
• Reverse brainstorming. Reverse brainstorming is an approach where you identify all of the ways you could exacerbate a problem, giving you the opportunity to address them preemptively.
• Rapid ideation. Typically a group brainstorming technique, rapid ideation involves each person anonymously writing as many ideas as they can for a particular project or goal within a limited ideation time. Somebody collects all of the ideas and lists them out (organized into related topics) for the group to evaluate and identify trends.
• SWOT analysis. With the SWOT analysis framework, you’ll evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats associated with an idea. For example, a founder wanting to expand into a new market could evaluate their company’s strengths (unique products), weaknesses (limited capital), opportunities (new revenue streams), and threats (competitive landscape) within that new market to evaluate if it’s a viable move and if it fits within their bigger picture goals.

Define long-term SMART goals

To implement big-picture goals, you need a clear plan. The SMART goal framework, an acronym that stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound, can help you evaluate the achievability of your long-term goals.

• Specific. Are your big-picture goals specific enough to be actionable, or are they too broad to define? For example, “Build an inbound marketing strategy that attracts new customers” is a less defined goal than “Launch a new blog that offers valuable information to our customer base.” Both involve big-picture thinking, but the latter offers a specific direction for how to get there.
• Measurable. Can you measure your big-picture ideas using quantifiable data? For example, when launching your new blog, you could evaluate key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor growth—like page views, time on site, organic search traffic, and conversion rate (to see how many blog readers take a desired action, like buying one of your products).
• Attainable. Is your big-picture goal realistic enough to achieve? “Earn 10,000 blog readers in the first three months” is likely an unattainable goal for your new blog. By contrast, “Publish one new blog post every Wednesday” is manageable and within your control.
• Relevant. Does your big-picture goal support your company’s overall goals and mission? For instance, launching a blog about gardening practices makes sense if your business focuses on selling gardening supplies but not if that’s a tangential topic to your primary business focus.
• Time-bound. What’s the deadline for your big-picture goal? Defining a time frame can help keep team members accountable and ensure everyone is taking action to complete a large project. For example, “Publish first blog post within two months” and “Write 15 articles before launching in November” are both examples of time-bound goals for a blog launch.

Expand your network

One of the best ways to broaden your thinking is by networking with people who can offer a wider perspective on topics related to your business. You can meet different groups, collaborators, or mentors at networking events. Network online by building your website and social media channels, preparing a quick elevator pitch, and finding ways to be useful to other people.

Building genuine and mutually beneficial relationships with people can help give you more context, ultimately informing your own big-picture thinking.

How to empower your team to think big

• Provide opportunities to engage
• Redefine failure
• Encourage your team to pursue their interests

Inviting your team to engage in big-picture thinking can help you leverage diverse viewpoints and empower each member to share their vision for growth. There are plenty of ways to help your team think, such as:

Provide opportunities to engage

Let your team engage with each other so they can learn about their unique backgrounds and perspectives. This can expand their horizons. You can set opportunities for cross-functional work, have more senior team members mentor younger ones, or host regular team-building events to give people an opportunity to talk to each other and collaborate.

“Working with different functional groups within an organization and not just being very narrow gives you an opportunity to network and learn what else you could do and understand where there could be gaps,” Connie says.

Redefine failure

Fear can be an obstacle. “When you decide to do something different and unknown, there’s an incredible amount of fear involved in that,” Connie says. “Because you’ve never done it before, there isn’t necessarily a roadmap. Your emotions get into play.” However, by redefining failure as an opportunity to learn, instead of as the opposite of success, you can encourage team members to try new things.

Encourage your team to pursue their interests

Pursuing interests, especially if they’re outside of a person’s typical expertise, can help team members in other areas of their work. You can encourage their interests by providing development funds or giving them time off to focus on personal projects.

Challenge team members to set goals that take them out of their comfort zone. “People always want to be challenged,” Connie says. “Statistics indicate that over 70% of people want to be constantly building up their skills, whether it’s in their field or outside of their field.” This can help them learn new skills and find new ways to problem-solve.