Connecting the Data & the Dots

One of the things that came up during Alison Chaltas’, EVP, GfK Interscope
Sarah Gleason’s, VP, GfK Interscope and
Bernd Larsen Linde’s, Director Global Trade Marketing, LEGO presentation
on Global Truths of Shopper Marketing was the importance of connecting your data to actions. I was reminded of this when I read this quote last week:

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”

— Steve Jobs in a 1995 Wired interview, one of 200 profound, inspirational, insightful quotes in I, Steve: Steve Jobs in His Own Words (via curiositycounts)