SEE THE SYSTEM. BUILD THE PLAN. LEAD THE OUTCOME.
The Big Picture Plan™
Hello
I’m Carolyn Thornlow. I created The Big Picture Plan™ and direct the program. It is the capstone to a long career as entrepreneur, C-suite executive and ultimately running a Better Business Bureau A+ rated management consulting firm for 35 years. Visit my personal LinkedIn profile to see where I’ve been, what I’ve done and how I’ve been regarded.
My Story
I was co-owner of 2 restaurants before I turned 25. This precocious entrepreneurship was my due to my father, who was also an entrepreneur. Instead of earning my allowance doing household chores, my roles involved organization and sometimes stepping in as spokesperson. That’s because my father was blind and deaf. His genius – advanced degrees, equity investor turned millionaire, winner of the Bausch & Lomb science award, author of games theory books, programmer, chess champion [yes, he had to keep a mental picture of the board in his head] and builder of a small business empire – may have been innate or because he had few choices and no distractions. That’s the subject of a larger debate. Either way, his view was the world view I inherited: knowing how a thing works by research and hypothesis testing and deducing realities not by visual cues but by inference, were methods to discover patterns and predict. In other words, it was a way to create a manageable universe from your desk.
It took me a professional lifetime to realize that this was a skill. While it served me well in business school, professionally I was often the only one in the boardroom who thought this way. That may be what motivated me to leave my roles as COO and CFO at major NYC law firms and start my own management consultancy. As I advised scores of firms, I had a front row seat to seeing patterns that repeated with predictability: people in leadership positions painted themselves into corners or took on chaos of their own making.
Why were they not seeing what I was seeing? How could they make decisions that did not account for the whole picture, where everything you need to know is right there?
This plagued me so that I spent my free time researching (yes, I’m a nerd) the likes of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky on decision making and heuristics, Donnella Meadows on systems thinking, Sydney Decker on failure, Robert Axelrod on cooperation to name just a few. What I found were certain power laws that always exist. And I thought:
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What if business owners and managers knew about these forces, saw their businesses as operants in this natural schema, understood their highest mandate as guardian and had a structured program bringing this all together so that they can control their firms’ destinies?
That is how the Big Picture Plan™ came into being.