Seeing the big picture

Salvador Dali could see the big picture. One of his works is called Fifty Abstract Pictures Which as Seen from Two Yards Change into Three Lenins Masquerading as Chinese and as Seen From Six Yards Appear as the Head of a Royal Bengal Tiger.

From even further away it looks like a coloured blob, like all paintings, but that’s not the point.

At the other end of the scale there is HD Turing’s 1948 essay The Problem of the Olive (we’re talking about flies that trout eat) in which he concludes that the best way to distinguish between three species of Baetis is to examine the colour of their eyes. He inscrutably declares that in B. rhodani “the eyes are madder brown (which has a distinctly red tinge)”.

Here is a picture so small as to be invisible to the naked eye. While he’s got his magnifying glass out comparing eyes the next bloke on the riverbank has tied on a hairy green-looking thing and caught the bloody fish.

In British Lite Culture we take the Turing approach. Thus, last week there was a nasty accident on the anticlockwise carriageway of Europe’s busiest road, the M25 – London’s orbital motorway – in which six people died. The police closed the carriageway for nine hours, bringing chaos to the surrounding area and presumably costing millions of pounds.

Now, I have nothing against the British police, despite having been searched (dogs and guns, the full works) under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act while provocatively dropping my wife off at Gatwick Airport.

But increasingly they’re missing the big picture. After all, what exactly is to be learned from a fingertip search of 500 metres of motorway? When I ask this people say “we need to know what happened”, and at first sight this seems sensible.

However, the job of the Highways Agency and the traffic police is not to pick obsessively over history but to keep traffic flowing. Their efforts on the M25 will end up as free consultancy for the insurance companies but I doubt if anyone else will truly benefit – certainly not the thousands of people whose lives were massively disrupted while skid-marks were measured.

In the PR business, as elsewhere, seeing the big picture helps your career trajectory as well as your client. Those who ask Why are we doing this in 10pt? stay writing press releases, while those who ask Why are we doing this at all? get promoted to account director

Remember that while small picture people re-arrange the deckchairs on the Titanic, the big picture types are getting into lifeboats (and the serious spin doctors are telling everyone we just stopped to take on fresh ice).