This week, I listened back to a 2020 radio interview with Booker Prize winner Douglas Stuart, talking about the process behind his hit debut novel Shuggie Bain. He said he wrote it without a plan, just starting with the characters and themes:
“When I write about poverty, when I write about homophobia, the patriarchy, addiction, loving - what it means to love - someone who is suffering from alcoholism, I write about that from the inside.”
So many people in education, in life, want the whole plan up front, without going into the details that will help them understand things from the inside.
The way my team works often feels like the opposite of how it should be done. People want the big picture first - “give me vision!” They want to know where it’s all going before they’ve done the detailed work of figuring out who they are, what they stand for, and how to say it.
Often, the big picture only appears once you’ve done that detailed work.
It reminds me of taking a zoomed-in photo on a long lens: you have to see the framing around the interesting detail by zooming in and taking time to focus. You can’t fear what else might be happening out of shot, or you never capture anything. Camera-zoom thinking, if you will.
Between sessions of listening to the radio this week, I was working with a high-performing school on its brand strategy. We weren’t trying to solve everything at once. One day, we focused on the elements of their Brand Pyramid. Another, tonal values. Another, the story. Another, what actions had to happen, when, in their Brand Clock.
And, inevitably, someone asked: “Can you show us where this is going?”. Someone always asks this, in every project we do.
It’s a fair question. But it’s also the wrong one, too early.
Because if you skip to the answer, or outsource the thinking, what comes back may look polished, but it won’t feel like you. You won’t have understood it from the inside.
That’s why the detailed work matters so much. Not because detail is more important than strategy, but because detail is often how strategy reveals itself.
The right frameworks help. Good advice helps. A critical friend can speed you up enormously.
But nobody can do your understanding for you.
Sometimes, to see the big picture clearly, you have to stop looking for it, for a moment, and pay attention to the small, specific, detailed work in front of you. It can even feel quite therapeutic if you can lower your gears for a while.
That’s not a distraction from the real work. That is the real work.