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Connecting the dots

As a lucky graduate of the Stanford class of 2005, I got to hear the great Steve Jobs speech about connecting the dots. It got me thinking ….

… do we emphasize the value of learning how to connect the dots enough?

In my view, the answer is No.  Instead, we emphasize questions like, how many facts  do you have memorized? How many answers did you get correct? And how many hours did you bill last year? And we determine a person’s intelligence and value based on that.

So we don’t spend nearly enough time teaching people how to “connect” the dots. We don’t teach law students how to leverage their intuition. Or MBAs how how to see things from a 10,000 foot view. Or managers how to see the story from connecting seemingly unconnected events.

We can’t teach connecting dots in a Dummies” Guide and we don’t have a handbook at work to show us how to do it.  We can only do it, by putting people in new situations where they look around, try new things, get more experiences and fail more often than they want to.

And in the end, this experience failing is more important than than the number of answers you got right.  Memorizing facts won’t help you make change but having vision in the face of  uncertainty might give you an opportunity to change everything.

We need to spend more time helping people to connect the dots.

Just a thought.

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