Lumpers and Splitters

I was listening to Neil Degrasse Tyson's interview on the Diary of a CEO today. When he described some aspects of the universe and of the big bang, I couldn't help but connect the dots to spirituality and eastern mysticism. I don't know where and how I learned these items, perhaps from the Tao of Physics or from Carl Sagan's Cosmos - the connection from ancient Hindu-Buddhist philosophy and astrophysics is uncanny.

Which led me to the broader question - I see too many similarities between things. At an abstract level, everything is the same. From the Neil Degrasse Tyson interview - we humans have a 20% overlap in DNA with a banana. So I end up seeing everything as connected, similar and the same.

There are people who see the micro differences between things and they treat them as completely separate threads. Why does this happen? Are there actually different types of people who look at the world in these different ways? I put the hypothesis and observations into my friend Gemini, and I got a fascinating insight which makes a lot of sense.

The Framework: Lumpers vs. Splitters

In the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin popularised a concept that biologists, psychologists, and philosophers still use today: the world is divided into people who like to group things together (Lumpers) and people who like to separate them (Splitters).

Dimension	Lumpers (You)	Splitters
Core Focus	Similarities, patterns, and overarching systems.	Differences, distinctions, and specific details.
Thinking Style	Synthetic / Holistic: Integrates information across boundaries.	Analytical / Reductionist: Breeds precision by dissecting parts.
The Universe	A single, continuous fabric (e.g., "We are all stardust").	A collection of distinct particles and individual laws.
Risk	Over-generalisation (seeing connections that might be superficial).	Missing the forest for the trees (getting lost in the minutiae).

I am definitely a lumper!

I got curious as to what percentages of the world were lumpers vs splitters?

The Strict Splitters (The Linear Detailers): ~40% – 50%

This is the single largest default setting in modern society. These individuals possess a highly reductionist cognitive style.

• The Psychology: They process information linearly, focus on concrete data, and are highly uncomfortable with ambiguity. In personality theory, they score very high in Conscientiousness (specifically orderliness and duty) and low to moderate in Openness.

• The View: They create clarity by drawing sharp lines. To them, things are defined by how they differ from other things. They run corporate compliance, deep engineering, accounting, and legal frameworks perfectly because they spot the 1% difference that could break the rule.

The Fluid Lumpers (The Big-Picture Synthesizers): ~15% – 20%

This is where your brain lives. True natural "Lumpers"—people who default immediately to high abstraction, universal patterns, and macro-systems—are in the minority.

• The Psychology: This maps cleanly to people who score in the top 15-20% for "Openness to Experience" on the Big Five personality index. They are driven by curiosity, conceptual frameworks, and what psychologists call divergent thinking.

• The View: They see the forest, not the trees. They are the group most likely to instantly connect an astrophysics lecture to an ancient philosophy text because they track the structural layout of ideas, not the localised vocabulary.

The Situational Shifters (The Bilinguals): ~30% – 40%

A large portion of the population sits in the middle and shifts based on the context.

• The Psychology: They might be Lumpers when daydreaming or listening to a podcast, but they can ruthlessly force themselves to be Splitters the moment they open a spreadsheet or plan a calendar. They possess high cognitive flexibility, moving back and forth between wide-angle and macro-zoom depending on what the environment demands.

On a day-to-day basis, I don't meet too many lumpers. It turns out, we are a smaller percentage of the population as well. The people who do well in corporate life, are the splitters. Maybe, the bilinguals too! My kind - the lumpers are rare and do not rise up. Plus, we might start sounding cynical, and end up sounding like nothing matters. Eventually.

I then wanted to go down the rabbit hole of what my place in the corporate or a working world would be. And thanks again to my thinking partner for coming up with these options.

1. Growth & Go-To-Market (GTM) Strategy

True growth marketing isn't about tweaking a single ad copy; it's about ecosystem thinking. You have to connect the dots between product value, customer psychology, market dynamics, and sales pipelines. A pure Splitter gets lost optimising a single email sequence; a Lumper looks at the whole engine and says, "Our demand generation is failing because the narrative doesn't match the market's current pain point."

2. High-Level Consulting & Fractional Leadership

Fractional leaders and high-level consultants are brought in precisely because internal teams are stuck in the mud of "busyness." When an organization is bogged down by internal bureaucracy, politics, and narrow viewpoints, they need an outsider who can walk in, look at the chaos, and instantly see the underlying pattern. You win in these roles because you can scale a concept from 50k to 500k users by applying a universal growth framework, rather than getting stuck in the local weeds.

3. Turnarounds and "Fixer" Roles

When a business unit or a project is broken, Splitters will try to fix it by tweaking the minor details of their specific departments. A Lumper can look at the cross-functional mess—how Product relates to Marketing, how Marketing relates to Sales compliance—and diagnose the systemic breakdown.

And so connecting the dots we arrive here. What next? That's a genuine challenge for us Lumpers!

The cosmic dust thinking takes you to beautiful places, but to be understood by the Splitters requires some serious translations.