Using Your Natural Tendency to Support Innovation When you have taken the Myers-Briggs assessment, you were an S.You may have been described as left-brained.You have excellent attention to detail.You may have a tendency to over-think things.Highlighting study notes doesn’t work for you, because you end up highlighting everything.You would prefer to edit or tweak a plan than to come up with it from scratch.You think about things in great detail and sometimes miss the big picture.When you have taken the Myers-Briggs assessment, you were an N.

You may have been described as right-brained.You are great at outlining what needs to be done but filling in the details can feel exhausting.You have a low tolerance for busywork, tedious errands, and filling out forms.You like to come up with new ideas and new projects.You can quickly see patterns in complex problems.Unsure what it means to be big picture vs detail oriented? The following are traits that are generally indicators of each thinking type: Typical of the Big Picture Thinker Whether you’re a team-member or team-lead, understanding how you and those around you think can help you optimize your team’s problem-solving capabilities and build an environment that fosters continuous innovation. There are systems and processes that can help you override your natural tendencies when needed. But it can also be a learned skill, if you wish to develop it. Whether you have good attention to detail or whether you can see the big picture easily and clearly is generally part of your personality. You’ll often find this division in partnerships and many times the CEO is a big picture person while the COO and the CFO are the details people. These two types tend to complement each other and work together very well.

On the other hand, the details people are conscientious, planful, and exacting… but can lack perspective or fail to prioritize. The big picture people tend to be creative, strategic, and visionary… but they can also be messy, disorganized, and forgetful. They say that there you’ll fall into one of two types of people – the ‘big picture’ person and the ‘details’ person.

This means that by understanding the approach you naturally take, you can figure out what type of projects and problems are best suited for your skillset and maximize your impact on the company. It is not to say that one type of approach is more effective than the others, but more so to say that different people are best suited to solve different types of problems. The way a person approaches and interprets a challenge says a lot about how they will solve it. Editor’s note: This post was originally published March, 2011 and updated October, 2020.

Seeing the bigger picture examples