{
  "id": "missing-the-forest-for-the-trees.abstraction",
  "term": "missing the forest for the trees",
  "sense": "abstraction",
  "pos": "noun",
  "status": "review",
  "level": 18,
  "arena": "cognitive",
  "domain": "levels and abstraction",
  "style": "folk",
  "definition": "A model that is built on parts fails to form the whole because attention stays at a narrow level, and the boundary of the larger thing is not recognized even though its pattern is present.",
  "folk_gloss": "focusing too much on details and not seeing the whole picture",
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "model.representation",
      "part.relation",
      "whole.complete",
      "boundary.limit",
      "pattern.regularity",
      "focus.attention",
      "narrow.spatial"
    ],
    "interaction": "parameter",
    "novel_properties": [
      "emergent"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "The 2008 financial crisis followed analysts tracking individual mortgage defaults while ignoring systemic risk in housing markets.",
      "domain": "economics"
    },
    {
      "text": "Engineers debugging individual circuits in the Ariane 5 rocket ignored integrated flight dynamics, causing cascade failure at launch.",
      "domain": "engineering"
    },
    {
      "text": "Biologists studying isolated neuron firings in rat hippocampi initially missed the spatial map pattern emerging across the ensemble.",
      "domain": "neuroscience"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [],
  "used_by": [],
  "forms": [
    "miss the forest for the trees",
    "missing the forest for the trees"
  ],
  "closed": false,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "phrases:qwen/qwen3-235b-a22b-2507",
    "date": "2026-07-29",
    "confidence": 0.7,
    "sources": [
      "folk phrase — levels and abstraction"
    ]
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-missing-the-forest-for-the-trees.abstraction"
}