As far as I know, there is only one known successful approach to working through large ideas, and that is to build solutions to smaller related problems and sca

As far as I know, there is only one known successful approach to working through large ideas, and that is to build solutions to smaller related problems and scaling up those solutions after some kind of objective information gathering. Generally a well-understood stable system of any kind (including a democracy) evolves from a smaller stable system. This principle is more or less built into the scientific process, where smaller results are peer reviewed and kicked around to a while before being combined to solve large problems.