Patrick:
Even when you are doing the routing you are thinking about the strategy of the individual holes ... a drawing may just look like centerlines, but the tee and green and landing area have been placed so that certain natural features come into play in certain spots. The bunkers are going to fit best where there is a slight rise, so that you can build a bunker and easily get the water not to drain into it; I'm likely to have routed the hole in question so that rise is 200-280 yards out and not 130, and I know which side of the hole it will be on. But, I have the power to change some of those things around if I decide it would be clearly superior another way.
At the start of construction of any course there are some holes where I have a pretty clear idea of what I want to do strategically, and others where I am still uncertain. (Of course, in a collaborative process like Sebonack, I couldn't commit as certainly on any one hole right away. When possible I will build the "easy" holes first to give myself more time to ponder the others, but we have to proceed in some sort of logical order for the irrigation to be installed.) My general approach is that I'm learning the land more and more with every site visit, so I'm open-minded on every one of the holes if something different and better happens to strike me.
I don't think about the individual holes too much while I am away from the site ... just on the way there and sometimes making notes on the way home. But of course I have other associates on site who are thinking about the holes all the way through. Before I leave at the end of one visit I will go over the next 3-4 holes with my asssociate or the shapers, so they can get things roughed in for me to finalize my next time through ... sometimes I will give them exact instructions of what I'd like them to do, other times I will be deliberately vague to let them figure it out.
When Jim Urbina and I walked through the first couple of holes we were going to build and I gave him instructions before I was leaving, Jim Lipe was with us, and after we were done with the ninth green (which took about three minutes to talk through) JWL asked JU when I was going to give him more detailed instructions ... and JU responded that I just had given him everything he needed. I remember clearly how incredulous JL was that I wasn't going to give JU any more detail than that. The result was one of the better greens on the course, and one of the few that we never really tweaked much on subsequent visits.
Other architects obviously do it differently, but I prefer to give my associates no more information than absolutely necessary. The other approach often produces a conflict where the green won't work exactly as drawn and it has to be modified; by giving just the bare essentials of how I want it to work, I reduce the odds that we'll build something that doesn't fit.
George P:
I thought I explained that pretty well to Tom Paul, that our choices of what to do with the 18th hole also affected the site of the first green and second tee and seventeenth green. If you make the 18th better, but the other three holes are compromised in the process, then you shouldn't have changed the 18th. No hole exists in a vacuum, each is just one piece out of 18 that have to fit together.