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bigger picture

n. An understanding of a situation that includes more than what is immediately apparent.

Usage examples of "bigger picture".

Despite Mzepps' appearance, though, the Lizard soon struck him as a typical noncommissioned officer: worried about his job, but not much about how it fit into the bigger picture.

One nice thing about turning into an officer was that he got his orders with one less layer of manure on top, and that they gave him a bigger picture of what was going on.

The way Sharp thought about the bigger picture and how things fit together made him want to do the same.

More, though, stayed up awhile to smoke and to hash over the battle and try to draw a bigger picture from the tiny pieces they'd seen.

If she was honest with herself, she knew that if she moved, she would have to face the bigger picture again, and she was reluctant to do that if she didn't have to.

They don't understand the detail of what's going on, and they don't have the courage to consider the bigger picture.

One ship - a big, new ship, still at the exploratory stage - would have been sufficient responsibility already: but now he had eight of them, to be handled as a single weapon, a single shield for what he had to guard: it meant that he must carry in his brain, not the manageable plan of his own command, but another bigger picture altogether - a picture with eight arms, eight different possibilities, eight assorted points of strength or weakness.

She didn't want to think about the bigger picture, about anything but that pipeline there, broken on the dunes.

In his first weeks at the lab, and in the company arboretum on Hunt plateau, he focused on the new plant species to the exclusion of everything else, content to work his way up to the bigger picture in due time.