boil the ocean
expressionops culture
To attempt something so broad or ambitious that it is doomed by its own scope.
Used as a warning in planning: 'let's not boil the ocean' means pick a tractable slice instead of trying to solve everything at once. The image is deliberately absurd - you cannot heat an entire ocean, so do not scope work as if you could.
Boiling the ocean is attempting something so ambitious in scope that it cannot succeed, and the phrase is usually deployed as a warning in a planning meeting. The rewrite that will fix everything, the migration that moves all systems at once, the standard that will unify every team's tooling.
The failure is not ambition, it is the absence of intermediate value. A project that delivers nothing until it delivers everything has no way to learn, no way to demonstrate progress to the people funding it, and no safe point to stop at if circumstances change. Since circumstances always change, the outcome is a large investment abandoned partway, which is worse than either finishing or never starting.
The alternative is not thinking smaller, it is sequencing. The same ambitious end state, decomposed so each step is independently useful and independently revertible, gets further because it survives changes in priority and produces evidence along the way. If a plan cannot be decomposed that way, that is usually a sign the plan is not yet understood rather than a sign the work is inherently monolithic.