From the vantage of a bird in flight, everything looks very different than it does here on the ground. Each individual person and tree and building looks smaller, and you lose a lot of the details that you can see head on. But from above it is also easier to see patterns, how the pieces relate to each other, how everything connects.
What do you do to get a bird’s eye view on complex problems?
To try to gain a view of the larger, more complex scene, I believe that I use two methods which intertwine: (1) I compare this current situation with similar ones from my past (2) I try to anticipate, from my using both the past and my present situation, to see how the larger picture of the future looks to me and then attempt to put a solution of the current complexity into my life by juxtaposing all of this together. Sometimes it works; sometimes not, but I think it’d worth the effort to combine these parts together. Obviously, changes along the way may make things go awry.