English: self created, no copyrights(PD עברית: יצירה עצמית, ברשות הכלל (ללא זכויות יוצרים) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
As a child, I remember spending hours working connect the dots work books. The simple act of drawing the line between numbered dots wasn’t the prize, but the picture was. It aided my education in learning numbers. And because I couldn’t draw very well the payoff was huge – I still can draw little other than stick people. I eventually advanced to paint by numbers – although painting between the lines was a challenge.
However, what is interesting is when I speak with organizations of all kinds . . . they still want the connect the dots thinking. These are college-educated men and women! Quick answers are needed for their problems and short-cuts, check-lists and Cliff notes are acceptable
This rarely ends well.
Look at what business has become . . . connect the dots everywhere with projects and project management – or what I like to call formal, scheduled connect the dots complete with schedules and a linear mindset. The pieces must fit together!
Funny, when you view organizations as systems you realize that the organization is more (or should be more) than the sum of its parts. We have all been tricked into thinking otherwise – its like the child within use revisits those workbooks. “Give me an easy answer.” All these “easy” answers lead to unintended consequences by adding complexity to the organization.
I don’t see an end to the madness soon. Especially in the US, where financially pressured organizations continue to seek out these types of solutions to satisfy WallStreet. There are better ways, but they will require a bit more than what we learned in elementary school.
I think it’s a consequence of living in an Information Age society and of turning much of our thinking over to experts. We have come to expect that there is a readily available answer for anything, and that there is an specialist or a software program out there that can provide it. Since we expect easy answers, we begin to undervalue thinking. The perception of intelligence becomes less about the capacity to learn and apply, and more about providing answers. This might be why advertisements for “proven tools” and “best practices” remain so persuasive. The context sets us up to believe that they exist!