Connecting the dots is a fun children’s game. It’s a lousy strategy for making sense of complex phenomena.
As a game, it’s fun to see a picture emerge as you drag your pencil from dot to dot. When it’s used as a metaphor for sensemaking in the real world, there are a set of hidden assumptions that are particularly pernicious because they are hidden. In the game, you start from a picture, select and number a collection of dots, and then erase the rest. You simplify a complex image into a subset of data points and a prescribed sequence for connecting the dots.
This is not a reversible process. You cannot collect a set of dots, connect them as you choose, and then claim that the image was sitting there all along. Nor can you criticize an analyst for failing to collect or connect the necessary dots in advance. It’s lazy language and lazy thinking.
While lazy thinking, it’s also rampant. Cast your mind back to your university days. It’s a safe bet that you had a course syllabus with extensive verbiage about academic integrity and the perils of plagiarism. And expectations for preparing terms papers laden with correctly formatted references to the literature you consulted as you did your research. Fail to include the proper incantations in your submitted work and you were at risk of dire punishment.
All of which encourages connecting the dots thinking and discourages developing the more robust skills of solving for pattern that you are going to need to tackle the open-ended and complex problems you will encounter.