Several areas high level engineering, logistics, and business deal with breaking problems down into their parts. Unfortunately the people that run big projects often have not studied them.
But I'm wondering if we're just doing this all wrong. If this kinda of mental technique shouldn't be taught very early in many disciplines...maybe even as early as elementary school.
It's not to say we should abandon the bottom up approach in use today, it's very useful for understanding many subjects. But there's very little done from a top-down style approach I'm thinking of...and it gives us a deficit in people who are unprepared for learning programming or similar disciplines later on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_research#Second_Worl...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_analysis#Overview
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_tree#General
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decomposition_%28computer_scien...