Connecting the dots.

A zebra and an alarm clock.

A beautiful sunset and a flying pig.

Taylor Swift and my great grandmother.

What do these things have in common? On the surface, absolutely nothing. But use a little creativity and you can “create” connections. Like the zebra who overslept each morning and kept getting separated from his herd…so he started using an alarm clock. Or the beautiful sunset the young couple was enjoying, in love, holding hands, until a pig – recently escaped from a nearby farm – came bounding through their field of view. Or maybe the fact that Taylor Swift and my great grandmother share the same first name and birthdate…and both were / are talented musicians (not true in my case, but certainly could be).

Connecting the dots…joining two seemingly unjoin-able things. This is a fun exercise for your brain, but a skill that I believe can unlock hidden creativity. A skill that is essential to learning and also essential to expanding ideas. And, as a skill, I believe it can be taught and honed and improved upon.

In our lives today, we are surrounded by products and services that make our lives better because someone at some time connected the dots.

• The original iPod – portable music…that also plays nicely with my computer

• The original Netflix – access to movies…but no more late fees

• Sonos – music all around the house…that works practically flawlessly

• Minute Clinics – healthcare…with extreme convenience

• Tesla – environmentally friendly electric cars…that are actually beautiful and high performance

I used to ask my daughter to give me two completely random ideas and I would make up a bedtime story that joined them (I’m pretty sure the zebra and alarm clock was one of her ideas). I’ve stopped doing that, but I think it might be time to restart that practice. I also tend to read more than one book at a time which sometimes has me thinking about them both together…often in very unexpected ways.

Seeing this in the real world is pretty amazing too. Have you ever been in a meeting and you find yourself a few steps ahead of others…already figuring out potential solutions? You’ve connected the dots before anyone else. Or on the flip side…unable to see a path forward when someone else seemingly magically comes up with a great idea? Yup, they’ve connected the dots before you have.

Anecdotally, many, many years ago, when I was at Sony, we were working on a video game concept for a movie (I can’t remember which movie), but the game involved running around and destroying bad guys. My boss at the time mentioned to me that the Ad Sales team had gotten State Farm Insurance interested in potentially sponsoring the game. That was a great business opportunity, but he wasn’t sure how it would work since there really wasn’t any tie-in between an action movie and an insurance company. Suddently, these two dots just connected in my brain and I suggested that what if at the end of every level a State Farm Insurance Rep comes running out onto the screen with a clipboard and quickly tallies up all the damage inflicted on that level – personal, property, auto. He loved the idea…I kind of liked it too. Nothing ever materialized from this, but it was one of the first times that I realized that connecting dots is very powerful.

Now, go figure out how to connect a delicious Thai curry with a Formula One racecar.

In the spirit of “connecting dots”, you can pair this post with one that I will send out next week about layers of abstraction.