To Win Connect The People NOT The Dots.

When answers are needed to a situation you often hear the advice to join or connect the dots.

The thinking is that if you take a good look you will see clues that relate that can put together the puzzle you face. Random occurrences are then pieced into one bigger picture to make sense. You often see this in crime detection or academic studies on specialist subjects.

It effectively says, ‘this has been what’s going on the in the background of X that resulted in Y’.

It appears a well thought of argument and system.

Well, not for some who took a 360 degree approach.

Step forwards Steve Jobs. The co-founder of Apple and pioneer of the personal and home computer revolution.

And he was also revolutionary in his thinking, Thinking that chose not to connect the dots, but connect the people. Why? Because he knew that we can’t connect the dots looking forwards. You can only connect looking back which means you’ve made mistakes, got stuck, gone in the wrong direction, or plain misunderstood something. But what you can do, and he did in a big way, is connect the people.

When designing the layout for the Pixar HQ (the company he bought from George Lucas in 1986), he built in only one set of toilets in the atrium (the large open aired front of a building). This required all employees to have to walk from all floors and areas across the building to use the facility. This seemed time consuming and thus would effective output. It didn’t. Jobs knew most workers remained in set smaller sized offices in their teams and departments which resulted in restrictive creativity, a ceiling on inspiration, and a block on outside ideas. By making everyone travel about the building they would begin to talk to others in various roles more often, share what projects they were engaged in, and fuse new relationships and cross creative suggestions. Of course, it worked.

The dots joined themselves after, they were connected in the people to begin with. Success could be assembled at the outset rather than from the ruins of failure later.

Cracking the code.

During World War 2 connecting the dots was apparently badly needed.

The Germans used an encryption device to share secret messages and manoeuvres which changed each day with special code books operators used to reconfigure the words and numbers into fresh message keys. The Enigma Machine. Despite the best efforts the Allies could not crack it. Connecting the dots was yielding blanks.

The British needed to break it or face losing the war. They asked mathematician and early computer scientist Alan Turing to help. He knew that one brain, no matter how specialist, could not break the code. Connecting the dots on the mass information available was too vast a task and would not work. He chose to connect a team instead to act as one bigger mind.

And that team was not simply more Alan Turing’s. He needed variety of thought and an ability to look at it from other angles. Therefore into the famous Hut 8 at Bletchley Park came crossword solvers, linguistics, translators, a chess champion, an Army Intelligence Officer, a historian, and a papyrology expert (study of ancient manuscripts and texts).

He connected the people into a team with one critical task – decoding Enigma. Each brought a skill and ideas and insights and shared them with their colleagues so that all minds had a collaborative expansion of what they knew and therefore could consider, focus on, and of course solve. Which they famously did in January 1940. It’s true to say that without it the Germans would have won WW2 in the end.

Connecting minds.

That is the power of people connection. Minds coming together in unison to float questions, points, problems, ideas, creativity, stories, discoveries, and concepts into one major result. A result that started BEFORE it was too late, not after. It picks at their individual mentality rather than picking up the pieces at the end when it’s all fallen apart.

A team or network of different and diverse minds acting as one mind is a massive creative force. It CREATES the dots themselves. Whether by the water cooler next to the company toilets or in a cold barren hut in wartime.

Next time you need to build something memorable or beat something blocking the way, connect the people so you can connect yourself to amazing outcomes.

References: Steve Job – ‘Rebel Ideas’ by Matthew Syed.

Enigma machine – widely available online. See www.bletchleypark.org.uk.