Have you ever been challenged for “not connecting the dots?”
It’s shorthand for leaders who fail to grasp a pattern of some looming risk. Not connecting the dots is how we explain human failure that could have been averted.
OK, how about a more positive use of the phrase? Like, “Hey, you connected the dots really well! And since you did, you created something new and wonderful.”
It’s not something people tend to say.
Which is too bad. Because it’s time to change our language and thinking: to stop focusing on non-connection (and all the problems that come from that) and start emulating leaders who are successfully linking people, knowledge, and markets, in new and creative ways.
Think about the iconography—nodes, links, relationships indicated here, other relationships connected there. Embrace the story being told right now by all those marker pens squeaking on conference room whiteboards. Everyone is looking for innovation. Connecting dots—finding and combining different networks—is how savvy executives are creating breakthrough products and other world-beating initiatives. Network leaders are the dot-connectors of the global economy.
Connections Gone Right
Consider Uber, the multi-billion dollar car-hailing company. Co-founders Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp began to think about the concept on a snowy night in Paris in 2008, when they had trouble getting home to their hotel. They started a discussion about accessing taxis from their smart phones, moved into ideas about sharing a car and driver between them, and eventually built a prototype business to dispatch free-lancing limousine drivers to people needing rides, faster and cheaper than getting a taxi.
Uber’s founders happened upon a network of frustrated taxi customers that could be matched to a nascent network of underused chauffeured cars. The young entrepreneurs built a platform and business that connected the dots, forming two new communities, both now committed to a new model of on-demand rides. Uber later expanded the business to include networks of drivers selling rides in their own cars. Its innovation continues apace.
Pioneering Predictive Genetic Research
Sage Bionetworks, an award-winning, open-source global research commons, was born when founder Dr. Steven Friend connected some different and unfamiliar dots—a growing wealth of available clinical data (for both sick and healthy people) with the world’s increasing knowledge about human gene sequences and composition. This dot connection is enabling development of pioneering predictive and causal models for a human diseases, and more targeted drug therapies based on the new models. (Friend developed the concept for Sage over time, building on insights from earlier work as a cancer researcher and employee at Merck ).
Stephen Friend – Sage Bionetworks
Sage now bridges traditional silos and disciplinary boundaries of the medical research world, creating collaborative communities and open source challenges, bringing together global networks of academics, clinicians, biologists, industry specialists, computational engineers, and even patients themselves. An open platform and governance model supports ever-expanding connections among experts, stakeholders and data.
Faster More Clever Football
Tony Franklin is the offensive coordinator of the University of California (Berkeley) football team— off to its best start in years, and a third season of improving win-loss performance. Franklin is known for distinctive coaching of the so-called up-tempo “spread” offense—a fast and flexible play-making strategy on the field.
Franklin recently accelerated offensive innovation with a clever crowd-sourcing process. He collects experimental ideas and tips about new plays from 250 high school coaches, clients of a nationwide training program he also runs. The Cal offensive coordinator consults these client coaches in a weekly group phone call; he’s created a community that learns from and contributes to Cal’s action on the field. Franklin’s dot-connecting is building a successful capability unlike that of any other coach.
Beating Al Qaeda
General Stanley McChrystal led an innovative Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the early years of the Iraq War. McChrystal explains JSOC’s success (reducing American casualties and later killing the all-important terrorist al-Zarqawi) by the collaborative capability he developed in the strike force. Their winning performance emphasized cross-boundary problem-solving, and rapid front-line decision-making.
The road to this organizational innovation began with some unusual dot-connecting by the general. Soon after he started the command, he realized that to fight the agile network of Al Qaeda he would have to create a network too. To do that, McChrystal revolutionized the strategic approach of JSOC, building a new level of collective intelligence by combining historically siloed military units with in-theater operatives, analysts, and agency officers in Washington D.C.
The new combination required new ways of working. The general had to bridge old boundaries and upend traditional assumptions about structures and reporting relationships; he built a high-trust, high-accountable culture focused on common purpose and community values. Newly-connected dots, run not as a hierarchy but instead as a networked “team of teams,” resulted in a wiser, deadly effective war effort.
Connecting Dots For Innovation
Why does connecting dots—finding and joining old and new networks, linking and combining existing and different resources or people—enable innovation? Why should that be part of any leader’s agenda today?
First, network leaders connect the dots because bringing together disparate domains and experts sets the stage for new possibilities. It’s why Steelcase works with anthropologists to design human-centric furniture and Steve Jobs forced consumer designers to work with hardware engineers. It’s why Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett became unlikely and successful collaborators.
In the same spirit of “creative combination,” Sage’s Steven Friend saw the opportunity of linking statisticians, biologists, and genetic experts, and masses of clinical data, in a new mash-up of disconnected intelligence about human body processes. In Iraq, McChrystal hoped for—and got–new actionable insights when CIA smarts were combined in real time with soldiers fighting Al Qaeda on the ground.
Second, network leaders connect dots because creating new networks supports the process of innovation. Breakthroughs are rarely “Eureka moments;” more often they emerge in fits and starts, through tinkering, experimentation and what Stephen Johnson calls “bricolage.” Connecting different networks and pieces of networks enables new discovery.
Uber has certainly evolved step by step, with founders Kalanick and Camp connecting and experimenting with different groups of drivers, and adapting the business to the taxi protocols of different cities. With Cal football, Tony Franklin’s crowd-sourcing idea slowly emerged when he realized that his top-down lectures were also becoming bottom-up brainstorming sessions. Sage Networks global commons joins multiple networks Friend developed in early phases of his career.
Connecting Creates More Connecting
Finally, network leaders connect dots because of “the ripple effect.” Tinkering always leads to further insights and opportunities. Networks find other networks as smart people reach out to other smart people; experimentation keeps reaching for the next evolutionary milestone of (as Stuart Kauffman has called it) “the adjacent possible.”
Thus McChyrstal’s innovative JSOC network started small. With each success it had against Al Qaeda, it was able to expand a little more, adding units that had been holding back and operating on their own. Uber’s software and business model has been iterated now countless times. Tony Franklin is experimenting more and more with ideas from local high school coaches. Each advance of Sage leads to more sophisticated predictive models and opportunities to reach for other data. Dots lead to more dots.
An Aspirational Metaphor
Connecting the dots may be only a metaphor, but it’s one whose time has come. Especially if you do it well and intentionally—and imagine it as an empowering concept to help you lead innovation.
So where are the dots, who are the people, what are the networks that you ought to be connecting now? Can you look beyond patterns of risk, and instead see big, new opportunities?
Originally published on Forbes.com