The gist of the LinkedIn post—the gist of so many communicators’ LinkedIn posts—was: Communicators aren’t paid to write well or to master communication channels. They are paid to …
—oh, you know what’s coming!—
… “connect the dots.”
I have despised this metaphor since before “think outside the box” ran out of currency, about two decades ago.
Why?
- In a dynamic and ever-evolving world, there are no fixed dots to connect. If there were, you wouldn’t hire a communicator to connect them, you’d hire the sort of slightly weird person who you might bring along to an escape room. But luckily for communicators, dots aren’t a thing.
- Even if there were dots, it’s laughably arrogant to anoint yourself the only one who can connect them. Imagine telling an intelligent colleague from another discipline, “Don’t worry, I’m here to connect the dots. Gotcha covered, Buttercup.”
- It’s insufferable, listening to communicators telling each other on LinkedIn and at conferences that their value has nothing to do with the actual skills and philosophies and strategic approaches we have developed over years of studying and working on difficult communication problems. Rather, we just magically “connect the dots.” (We must have a lot of free time, in between.)
A counselor once told me when I was young that it was important to see myself as other people saw me. I think a lot of non-communications people see communicators as people who, as my adman dad used to say about public relations people, “have a magnificent grasp of the obvious.”
What do we actually know that others don’t know?
I hope we pay more careful attention to all the various people inside and outside our organizations, and listen more closely to what they want and need from our leaders.
I hope we argue the organization’s case so compellingly and tell its stories so well that no one would ever want anyone else doing it on the organization’s behalf.
I hope we see more clearly than most how the organization fits into the culture, rather than just the industry or the economy.
And I hope we uniquely remember that an organization is not a money machine or a collection of programs, but an ongoing peopled-institution epic, every new chapter of which we insist on placing in context of the past, while foreshadowing the future.
And please don’t say that’s what you mean by “connecting the dots.”
Because at the same time that it’s arrogant for workaday communicators to claim exclusive dot-connecting powers … it’s also demeaning to truly wise and talented communicators, whose contribution deserves a far richer and more meaningful metaphor than this.
