CREATIVITY | "Connect The Dots"
"Creativity is just connecting things."
“A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have." – Steve Jobs (Wired, February 1995)
Though Jobs was talking about the computer space, his comments are true for any industry as it applies to creativity in general. It’s funny. If you were to ask anyone in Marketing what shortcut I used most over the years, it’s this one. Like the other aphorisms I’ve internalized, it feels very cliche and rather banal on the surface. But if you dig deeper, you can uncover the complexity in this statement–the many valuable gems. If you look higher, you can see the vastness in the sky, and so many bright stars.
When I think of “connecting the dots,” I see two separate but related processes: recognition and synthesis. Recognition is about pattern-detection. You need to be able to see the big picture so that you can see the all the individual dots. By using a dialectical process, a synthetic way of thinking, I’m then able to see the various connections and their relationships to one another.
By way of analogy, here’s how you can think about it. In elementary school, I was enamored with the night sky. Where my friends saw random twinkles of light, I saw specific constellations that I had memorized, like Cassiopeia, Ursa Major, and Orion. The thing is, we all were looking at the same thing. Yet we were seeing differently.
Animal Brand Activity Map
“When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a
little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.
It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able
to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the
reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences
or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.
Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity.”
The passage above comes from the same Jobs quote. It’s not difficult to
think differently, or see differently. You just have to learn how. In
other words, creativity can be taught and learned, as research has shown
us. This kind of synthetic thinking can even be put to paper, though
perhaps in a rudimentary way. For instance, using a mind map, I created a
draft of the Animal brand and its various connections. I used this mind
map as a tool to help the Sales Department think about the brand.
Animal Brand Values Mindmap
A mindmap allows you to see "dots" and the connectedness between them. Above is a visual representation of the brand's core values and attributes.