Analytic vs. Holistic Thinking Battle when you are A UX/UI Designer

When I introduce my strengths, I would like to say I am great at analytic thinking, breaking down complex problems in a logical way. I also describe myself as a holistic thinker which means I start with mapping out the big picture, and end up with creating a journey map, users landscape etc.

But I accidentally read about an article saying Analytic thinking is the opposite side of Holistic Thinking. To me, that means if we are too analytic, we may have risks of only focusing on small potion of the problems and losing the big picture, if we only be holistic, then we might have risks of overlooking details.

What does it mean when I say holistic thinking as a designer?

For example, when designing enterprise apps(internal tools) what does it mean by holistic design: 1 Principle: Not design by the ask, what I mean by that it is to instead of design directly by what stakeholder has asked for, encourage them to step back, and we can ask more profound questions to understand the goals, the paint point, the business objectives, the roadmap, and then we can research about cross-functional workflow(collaboration) or any dependence between departments. For example, we want to design a request for a change feature; the holistic design makes sure we think the entire workflow. Not just the direct user, we need to holistically create a workflow that would consider what happened before or after users submit a request, and how the other parties will react to the request, and then what the feedback loop of the request and how the app react on the feedback loop.

The article, it says different people have different ways of approaching problems. One of the most important distinctions is between analytic and holistic styles. Analytic thinking involves understanding a system by thinking about its parts and how they work together to produce larger-scale effects. Holistic thinking involves understanding a system by sensing its large-scale patterns and reacting to them.

I am not sure if I agree analytic/holistic thinking is the most important distinction of approaching problems.

I clearly use both thinking approaches to solve problems. I believe other people might do the same things. You have to form some understanding of big problems, and then look into a focal point to start solving problems. In reality, we might call that focal point as priorities, key metrics, user paint points, etc. The big pictures could be user journey and product roadmap etc.

So I would say that two patterns of approaching problems happen in parallel and they are not necessary to separate our ways of thinking apart unless I am a rare mix of analytic thinker and holistic thinker, which is very likely a truth.

What do you think? Do you think if you are a more analytic thinker or you are a more holistic thinker?

Here is an article about the analytic_vs_holistic_thinking

(http://www.intropsych.com/ch07_cognition/analytic_vs_holistic_thinking.html)