One of our amazing abilities as a human being is pattern recognition, we are highly skilled at recognising patterns, trends, making sense of seemingly random data, turning it into information. We see horses in the clouds and faces in the rocks on the mountains. It’s natural and normal for us to do this. It’s also worth knowing that we do it and that we are doing it all of the time – we join the dots, we make guesses, extrapolations and even hard conclusions sometimes on just a few ‘dots’ of data.
So what? The 'so what' is to notice and understand that not only do we join the dots but so does everyone else. Constantly. It’s what we do. It’s a human problem, not your problem.
Read on... or watch Ged's animation first...
It’s all part of the natural flowing creativity of human beings. We have a thought (dot one) we are attracted to that thought, we think it’s relevant so magically we have more thoughts. (dots 2 to….. many). A shape, a form begins to emerge in our thinking, an idea or a concept. If we want it to that idea or concept may eventually become an object in form – we may ‘realise’ our thoughts.
But notice something, at times we make these conclusions about people, situations, problems, challenges, ideas, proposals, presentations etc. with only a few dots of data. We’ve seen the dots before, we think we know where they’re going, we know the shape, we’ve already ‘got it’.
That means at times when we are making a presentation to the whole team, having a one-to-one, talking in a meeting the other humans have already made up their minds - after just 3 dots – they can see “it’s a triangle!”
They’ve concluded they have enough data and they are seeing it clearly. They are going to share this with their teams, colleagues, friends etc.
It’s a triangle clearly. And they can see that the triangle it’s hard, cutting, edgy, tricky, difficult, the thin end of the wedge….
The trouble is had they listened they might have seen that you were trying to communicate the smiley face – many more dots and an entirely different message! Warm, human, open, creative, responsive....
They heard cutting jobs, automating people out of the business, hard times, profit before people.
You wanted to convey investment in a future , longevity, opportunity, building a future for their community and beyond.
‘They’ are you, me and everyone.
Watch out for the joining of dots and stay in the flow.
Ged
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