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Granular

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(pronounced gran-yuh-lur)  adjective

Definition

1. consisting of or appearing to consist of grains or granules; grainy. 2. very small or minute; characterized by or done with extreme attention to detail.

Other Forms

Granularity (pronounced gran-yuh-lar-ih-tee) noun

Main Example

• Some film critics have described Steven Spielberg’s latest masterpiece as perhaps the most accurate Lincoln movie ever. Indeed, the filmmakers went to extraordinary lengths to imbue the film with authenticity, displaying an obsession for detail at the most granular level. Two specific examples, as revealed in an NPR interview: the sound designer and his team traveled to the Studebaker Museum in South Bend, Ind., which houses the carriage that Lincoln rode in when traveling between the White House and Ford’s Theater, to record the precise sound of its doors’ opening and closing; and to portray the exact sound Lincoln would have heard whenever church bells were ringing in the vicinity of the White House, they tracked down two bells that were installed in churches near the executive mansion during the 1860s.

Workplace Examples

• One big difference between my new boss, Iris, and her predecessor Shari is Iris’s level of interest in everything I’m doing. Even on relatively minor assignments, Iris constantly asks questions in a very specific and granular way.
• Until now, no one in top management would tell us employees exactly why the company abandoned the project in Chile. Today, for the first time, one of the execs leveled with us and addressed the issue with granularity, giving us precise reasons behind that stunning decision.

Other Examples

• after emerging from a meeting with the company’s CEO, an exasperated manager telling her colleague: “He is much too involved in the granularity…in the microscopic aspects of everything that’s going on.”
• during a Congressional hearing involving a case of corporate malfeasance, an executive professing innocence, saying that he was operating at too high a level to be granularly involved in the alleged actions; police investigators grilling a suspect, demanding more granular information; the Hurricane Katrina disaster being partly blamed on relief authorities’ failure to plan at the detailed and granular level
• at the start of a session to brainstorm possible solutions to a problem, one invitee saying: “I find the definition of the problem to be a bit vague. Can someone make it more concrete, more granular?”
• a couple of years before the killing of Osama bin Laden, on being asked why the al Qaeda leader still hasn’t been caught, a Pentagon spokesman indicating it’s because we don’t have “sufficient granularity” in the part of Pakistan where the al Qaeda leader is supposedly hiding

© 2014 V.J. Singal
No part of this may be reproduced in any form without written permission of the author.

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