Seeing the Big Picture is the Civil Service behaviour about understanding how your work fits into wider organisational objectives and public service priorities. It asks whether you can look beyond your immediate task and consider the wider effect of decisions and activity.
A strong example connects day-to-day work to something larger. That may be a team objective, organisational strategy, stakeholder need, government priority or wider public outcome. At senior grades, the scope becomes broader and the evidence should normally become more strategic.
Your job advert will tell you whether this behaviour is being assessed and which selection method will be used. The current Civil Service behaviour guidance sets out the expectations by grade.
What Seeing the Big Picture means
The behaviour is fundamentally about context. You should understand why the work matters, who else it affects and how your choices support the organisation’s wider goals. Knowing the corporate strategy is not enough on its own. The assessor needs to see how that wider understanding changed what you did.
Strong examples may show that you changed priorities because of an organisational objective, identified an impact on another service, responded to an external trend or brought several stakeholder perspectives together before making a decision.
At senior grades, the wider picture may include government priorities, policy changes, financial pressures, public expectations or external economic, social, political, environmental and technological developments.
What the behaviour looks like by grade
| Grade | What the evidence should show |
|---|---|
| AA / AO | Understand your responsibilities, how they support team priorities and how your work may affect people with different needs. |
| EO | Understand how your work and your team’s work support wider objectives, keep up with relevant issues and stay focused on overall goals rather than isolated tasks. |
| HEO / SEO | Understand strategic drivers, align work to wider organisational priorities, track emerging issues and show how the team’s activity creates value for stakeholders. |
| Grade 7 / Grade 6 | Use a government-wide perspective, understand external developments, align plans to strategic priorities and bring together different stakeholder perspectives to shape activity. |
Choosing a strong example
Choose a situation where understanding the wider context genuinely changed your actions. A project plan that simply followed the existing schedule is unlikely to show the behaviour well. A stronger story might involve stopping low-value activity, changing a delivery approach because of a broader priority or identifying a knock-on effect on another team or customer group.
The assessor should be able to identify both the immediate task and the larger objective it supported. If the wider objective is missing, the example can easily read like ordinary planning or project management.
Seeing the Big Picture 250 word statement
State the immediate piece of work and the wider objective early. Then explain the wider factors, stakeholder needs or dependencies you identified and show how that understanding changed your priorities or actions.
The result should demonstrate value beyond your own task. That might be better use of resources, stronger alignment to strategy, fewer downstream problems, improved customer outcomes or a clearer contribution to a wider organisational objective.
Seeing the Big Picture example
The existing example below is worth retaining because it links an immediate workload problem to the organisation’s wider position and shows the candidate changing priorities around the bigger objective.
Seeing the Big Picture interview questions
Typical Seeing the Big Picture questions include:
- Tell me about a time your work affected another team or service.
- How does your role support your organisation’s wider objectives?
- Tell me about a time you changed your priorities because of a wider organisational need.
- Describe a time you had to consider several stakeholder perspectives.
- Tell me about a trend or external change that affected your work.
- How do you make sure your team understands why its work matters?
- Describe a time you challenged local activity because it did not support the wider goal.
For senior roles, prepare at least one example that goes beyond the immediate team and shows a strategic or cross-organisational perspective.
Common mistakes
- Describing a project plan without connecting it to a wider objective.
- Using the word “strategy” repeatedly without explaining what the strategy required or how it changed your actions.
- Focusing entirely on the immediate team’s success.
- Ignoring customers, other services or downstream consequences.
- Using a senior example with no strategic, cross-organisational or external context.
Find an example for your grade. Select the level of the job you are applying for. These examples show different levels of responsibility, so tailor the evidence and decisions to your own experience.