True insight and innovation are rare.  My ramblings below are not new or novel … they are built on the thoughts and ideas of many folks far more insightful than me.  Sometimes great ideas get put on a shelf and gather dust.  Pulling them off the shelf, blowing off the dust, and applying to the context of the current environment can rekindle the fire of learning and discovery…. 

I have been an avid reader my whole life, for work and for pleasure (and for many years, work has been a pleasure). And for almost as long I have been a bit of a broken record on the value of engaging in diverse content. Reading outside my lane. Learning from other industries. Seeking out the point of view I do not already hold. As a coach I encouraged “getting out of the box” to explore different perspectives: change up where you go, who you talk to, and how you invest your time. This post is simply an opportunity to rekindle some of those thoughts and explore the concepts in a bit more depth.

Fundamentally, insights and innovative ideas occur when two previously disconnected ideas bump into each other at the right time with the right context. Yes, serendipity is real and is like luck: it is what happens when preparedness meets opportunity.  Let me paint the picture I keep in my head. Imagine every idea you have ever picked up as a single dot on a page. A book you read. A conversation that stuck with you. A lesson from an industry that is not your own. A problem you once wrestled to the ground. Each one is a dot.

On its own, a dot just sits there. Inert, isolated, waiting. And here is the important part. A new idea, an innovation, an ah-ha moment, is almost never a brand new dot that appears out of thin air. It is a line drawn between two dots that were already on the page, or a an existing dot and a new dot recently acquired, but had never been connected before. The dots are the raw material. The connection is the insight or the “Ah-Ha” moment. 

I wrote in a previous blog  that my favorite part of any learning journey is the ah-ha moment, insightful “spark” when I connect some previously unconnected dots. So,  if insight is a connection between dots, then the number of dots I am carrying around and the number of new dots I am adding on a continual basis sets the ceiling on how many connections I can ever make.

Gutenberg didn’t invent from scratch. He connected two previously unrelated technologies: the power of a wine press and the precision of a coin punch. The result was one of history’s most transformative innovations: the printing press. The fellow who dreamed up Velcro had been picking burrs off his dog. Neither one invented something brand new out of thin air. They connected two (more likely many) dots that were already sitting there, waiting for someone to draw the line between them. Smarter people than me have named this. Arthur Koestler called it bisociation. Steven Johnson calls it the adjacent possible. Frans Johansson calls it the intersection. Different labels, same idea. The good stuff happens where previously unrelated things touch. Now let me put on my skeptic hat for a moment, because a nice metaphor is not an argument. Does the number of dots really matter that much, or does it just feel good to say so?

It turns out the math is not subtle. The number of possible connections among your dots does not grow in a straight line with the dots. It grows exponentially, driven by the number of pairs. Five dots give you ten possible connections. Ten dots give you forty-five. Twenty dots give you one hundred ninety. Fifty dots give you more than twelve hundred. Read that again… doubling the dots from ten to twenty did not double the connections, it nearly quadrupled them. This is the same idea behind Metcalfe’s Law, that the value of a network grows with the square of the number of nodes on it. Our minds are networks. Every dot we add wires itself, at least potentially, to everything already in there. That is a wonderful deal. Add one dot, gain a line to every dot you already had.

So How Do Dots Actually Connect?

If the dots are the raw material, how does the connection itself actually happen? 

The first is serendipity, the bump. Two dots simply find each other. You are reading a novel on a Sunday afternoon and a scene lands right next to a work problem you have been chewing on for weeks, and suddenly the two are holding hands and you did not plan any of it.  You wake up in the middle of the night with the best idea since sliced bread: something you heard that day triggered a connection. This is the magical version, and it is very real. But I have come to believe it is not pure luck. Remember, chance favors the prepared mind (or in other words, luck is what happens when preparedness meets opportunity). The collision may be random, but the odds are not. The more dots sitting on your page, the more often two of them will drift into range at the same moment. You cannot schedule serendipity, but you can absolutely tilt the table in its favor by carrying more dots. Density is how we manufacture our own luck.

The second is deliberate connections.  Call it curiosity, the reach. It is really a posture, an open mind that walks around with three questions always running quietly in the background. What if? What about? How does that relate to what I already know? You do not sit and grind two dots together. You simply refuse to let a new dot sit there in isolation. You pick it up, turn it over, and ask what else it might touch. What does poultry processing have to do with software design? What could a cooperative learn from a pharmaceutical supply chain? These are not clever techniques, they are just the natural questions of a mind that has decided to stay open and curious. It is the version you can practice on any ordinary Tuesday, inspiration or not, because curiosity does not wait for a mood. Do it long enough and it stops being something you try and becomes simply how you see, a standing invitation for your dots to find one another.

If I am honest, most of my own ah-ha moments have been a blend of the two. The curious questioning pulls two unlikely dots close together, and then, some quiet moment later, serendipity finishes the job.

Are All Dots Created Equal?

The diversity of the dots is critical.

More dots are not necessarily what is required. It is not that simple. Think about it… if I read the same analyst I read last quarter, attend the same conference I attend every year, follow the same handful of voices I already agree with, and spend all of my time inside the one organization I know best, am I really adding dots? Or am I just thickening a cluster I already have? Am I collecting new nodes, or only drawing darker lines between the ones already sitting on top of each other?

Clustered dots are sneaky, because they FEEL productive. You leave the familiar conference nodding along, energized, because everyone in the room confirmed what you already believed. You finish the author you always read feeling sharp, because they sanded the very same edges you have been sanding for a decade. But is that insight, or is it comfort? A room where everyone shares your reference points cannot hand you a connection you did not already have. The dots are simply too close together for a line between them to surprise anyone.

I am not the first skeptic here. The sociologist Mark Granovetter showed decades ago, in what he called the strength of weak ties, that the genuinely new information tends to reach us not through our closest contacts (who mostly know what we know) but through the acquaintance two worlds over. Ronald Burt studied this inside real companies and gave us structural holes. His finding is blunt: The people who reliably produce the ideas that others rate as valuable are not the smartest folks in the densest group. They are the ones who sit at the edges and reach across the gaps between clusters that do not otherwise talk to each other.

So the diverse dot is not just the nice thing to have. It is the more valuable one, because it reaches a part of your network that nothing else can. Which means the most useful book I read this year is probably the one furthest from what I already know. And the most useful person in the room is usually the one who does not share my industry, my role, or my opinions.

It Is Not Just About Reading

And it is not just about reading. That is the safe version, and I want to be honest about that. You can read widely and still live narrowly. The same exponential math runs through every kind of experience, and the diversity has to run through all of them.

• Conferences. If every event on my calendar is aimed squarely at my role and my industry, I am collecting clustered dots on someone else’s schedule. Some of my best ah-ha moments came from a food-safety session I attended as a technology leader, or a technology session I sat in as a food guy.
• People. The fastest way to borrow a dot from a world I will never live in is to talk with someone who does. A finance leader looks at the very same problem I am staring at and sees something completely different. Diverse people are diverse dot-collections walking around.
• Industries. More than three decades running technology in one food company, then time in organic dairy, then advising across protein, produce, and agribusiness, taught me the same lesson over and over. The answer to a hard problem in one industry is very often a solved problem in another.
• Roles. Sitting in a different seat hands you dots you cannot get any other way. My time as a CIO taught me things no amount of reading ABOUT the CIO role ever could. Volunteering on a board taught me things the operating job never would. Coaching youth hockey and being a cub scout den leader forced me to view things from very different perspectives and lead in an entirely different manner.

The point is not to be busy. Heaven knows we are all busy enough. The point is to make sure the dots come from genuinely different places, so that when two of them finally connect, the line between them is one nobody has drawn before.

Where AI Comes In

Now the part I am most excited about, and I will be transparent about how I got here, because that is really the whole point.

For most of my career, the real limit on collecting dots was physical. There are only so many hours for research, only so many books I can finish in a year, only so many conferences I can fly to, only so many experts who will give me an hour. Every dot had a cost, and that cost quietly capped how many I could ever hold.

AI has knocked many of those walls down. And true to form, I used AI while writing this very post, partly to practice what I preach. I asked it to argue AGAINST me, to surface the fields I would never think to look in, and to poke holes in my perspective. (I will admit, it was a little humbling how quickly it found the good stuff.)  I corrected it’s output, prodded it to go down different avenues (connecting dots along the way) and look at different sources.  Along the way it exposed me to new thoughts, new ideas, new perspectives (a veritable rabbit hole at times…)

A few ways it changes the economics of a dot:

• It accelerates the forming of dots. A week of reading to get oriented in an unfamiliar field is now an afternoon.
• It expands the universe of dots I even know exist. Honestly, this is the big one. The hardest part of diverse thinking was never reading the distant field, it was knowing the distant field was there to read at all.
• It helps me synthesize. Holding a dozen unrelated dots in my head and forcing them into a coherent shape is hard work, and AI turns out to be a genuinely useful thinking partner for arranging them and testing whether a connection actually holds.

But here is where the skeptic hat goes back on, because this matters. None of this replaces critical thinking. It only lowers the cost of forming the dots. AI can hand me a hundred dots by lunchtime, but it cannot tell me which connection actually matters, whether the insight is true, or whether it is worth acting on. That judgment is still mine. If anything, when dots get cheap, judgment becomes the whole ballgame.

And there is a trap, the very same trap as before. Used lazily, AI is a cluster machine. Ask it a broad question and it hands you the consensus, the average, the middle of the distribution… which is the densest cluster there is. Left on its defaults it will feed me the most connected, least surprising dots and call it research. So I have to push it toward the edges on purpose. Ask for the dissent. Ask for the foreign analogy. Ask for the view I do not want to hear. Diverse dots do not become automatic just because collecting them got cheap. The intent still has to come from me.

So Are We Even Paying Attention?

Which brings me to the piece I had not fully named until I sat down to write this, and I will admit I am still hunting for the right word for it.

Call it awareness. Or receptivity. Or presence. Or, borrowing from Pasteur one more time, the prepared mind. Whatever we name it, here is the uncomfortable truth it points at. Two dots can touch right in front of you and you can miss it completely. The connection sails right past, unremarked, because your head was somewhere else. You were rushing to the next meeting. You already knew the answer, or thought you did. You were listening to reply instead of listening to understand. The collision happened, and nobody was home to notice.

So the real question is not only how many dots do I have, or how hard am I reaching. It is this. Am I present enough to catch a new connection the moment it forms, and open enough to sit with it long enough to see why it makes sense?

I have not fully cracked this, but here is where I am landing on how to stay in that state of mind:

• Stay curious on purpose. Curiosity is the muscle that keeps you asking what does this remind me of? instead of filing everything under I already know that. When I catch myself dismissing something quickly, that is usually my signal to slow down and look again.
• Keep a beginner’s mind. The expert’s curse is that expertise breeds certainty, and certainty makes us blind to the dot sitting right next to the one we already trust. The best connectors I know wear their expertise loosely.
• Leave some white space. Connections almost never land in a packed calendar. They surface in the gaps, on a walk, in the shower, on the drive home. If every minute is booked, there is no room for two dots to find each other. Protecting a little unstructured time is not indulgence, it is where a lot of the actual thinking happens.
• Hold judgment for a moment. The instinct to grade an idea the instant it appears kills a lot of fragile connections before they have a chance to form. Let the odd pairing sit there a while before you decide whether it is any good.
• Write it down. A connection you do not capture is a connection you will lose. I keep my dots, and the half-formed lines between them, somewhere I can see them, because the ah-ha rarely shows up fully dressed.

None of this is complicated. But it is the whole difference between owning a thousand dots and actually noticing the moment two of them light up.

So Where Does That Leave Me?

Right about where I started, only with fewer excuses.

Collect dots. Real ones, from far-flung places, not another layer on a cluster you already own. Then connect them, both by leaving room for the lucky bump and by deliberately reaching across the gaps. And above all, stay awake to it. Stay curious enough, and open enough, to notice the moment two dots light up and to trust that it matters. Read the thing outside your lane. Take the meeting that has nothing to do with your day job. Ask the model for the argument against you. Then get out of the way and let the dots do what dots do. The connections, and the ah-ha moments, tend to take care of themselves.

I would love to hear how you collect and connect your own dots. What is the most unexpected connection you have stumbled into lately? Hope you enjoyed the read…

A Few Sources Worth Exploring

Metcalfe’s Law (network value grows with the square of the number of nodes).

Louis Pasteur, “chance favors the prepared mind” (1854).

Shoshin, the Zen idea of a beginner’s mind (openness, eagerness, and no preconceptions).

Mark Granovetter, The Strength of Weak Ties (1973), summarized by Stanford Report.

Ronald S. Burt, Structural Holes and Good Ideas, American Journal of Sociology (2004).

Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From, overview.

Frans Johansson, The Medici Effect, author’s page.

Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (bisociation), overview.