Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Communicators, Stop Saying You ‘Connect the Dots’; It’s Dumb

07.15.2026 by David Murray // Leave a Comment

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?

  1. 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.
  2. 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.”
  3. 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.

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Nothing to Fear, But the Fear of Death Threats

07.14.2026 by David Murray // Leave a Comment

Today Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett are going in front of Congress to request millions of dollars in security protection for themselves, their families, and also other federal judges whose lives are being threatened frequently. Which, among the steady drumbeat of death threat news, reminded me of this piece that I wrote last year. —DM

***

Let’s talk “death threats.”

Bill Maher has a feature called, “I don’t know it for a fact … I just know it’s true.”

That’s how I feel about most things I think I know about death threats. I don’t know it for a fact, I just know it’s true:

• That the top 1,000 people who have ever made a death threat are accountable for 75% of all death threats.

• That nine hundred and twenty-two of those top 1,000 death-threateners are operating out of man caves.

• That the vast majority of death threats aren’t “credible,” because people who threaten death are lazier than they are angry. Really? You’re mad enough that you want someone to die? But so lazy you won’t even get off your couch?

• That still, because a “credible” death threat is best defined as one made to you and your loved ones, death threats are terrifying to anyone who receives them. And public officials constantly terrified by death threats—or just the terrifying prospect of getting death threats—can’t accurately represent the sorts of courageous American citizens we need represented.

• That if we didn’t want a society led by terrified public officials, the FBI would get very serious and create a Branch of Death-Threat Investigation. The BD-TI would hire some very smart young programmers to effortlessly trace the dumbfuck sources of death threats, and also retrain a small percentage of ICE officers to specialize in raiding man caves.

• And that if BT-DI officials started giving “the worst of the worst” death-threateners a very public taste of their own terrifying medicine (see below), there’d be many fewer death threats, all of a sudden. And maybe—just maybe—a lot more political courage.

• And unlike urban crime, government bloat, inflation and high healthcare costs, we could largely solve this death-threat problem in a matter of months.

I don’t know it for a fact. I just know it’s true.

Don’t you?

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She Made You Feel Welcome to Stay

07.13.2026 by David Murray // Leave a Comment

My friend (and my running mate Paul Engleman’s beloved wife)

[and my younger friends Joe and Lucie’s beloved mother]

Barb Carney died last Monday night.

She was (still is) poetry, more than prose.

Dappled more than sunny or shaded.

Like the garden that she wrapped around her home.

Philosophically eclectic, spiritually consistent, essentially vigilant.

Gentle. Steely. A little world-weary. Still curious. And always prepared for the very next thing you said to be funny as hell.

I could go on, and I hope others will.

But you gotta be careful, writing about Barb:

I once told her I was considering writing a diary of my wife’s cancer treatment

And she said as strongly as she ever said anything to me, “Please don’t!”

She also thought Joan Didion’s book about her spouse’s death, The Year of Magical Thinking

Was endlessly self-indulgent.

So I’d rather offer a single observation, to remember Barb

(and Barb knows what I’m about to say next because we joked about it):

When Barb offered you coffee

After dinner at their house—

And she always did—

you felt loved in a way

that you vaguely understood

that you hadn’t felt loved in a while.

Or maybe ever, before.

Barb had as good an understanding

Of what we are doing on this planet—

(Kurt Vonnegut said it was to “help each other

get through this thing, whatever it is”)—

As anyone I’ve known.

And she loved this song.

Let’s hum along.

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