Connecting the Dots: Strategic Lessons from Pac-Man
Connecting the Dots: Strategic Lessons from Pac-Man
The ability to collect and connect dots across a broad spectrum strengthens your perspective, offering the power to foresee, adapt, and innovate.
You can’t connect dots if you don’t collect dots.
Dots represent market intelligence, insights, and information. They are key drivers for leaders to de-risk and diversify business. While there can be a temptation or habit of sticking to the familiar - what emerges in local news, boardroom discussions, the email inbox, or on the mobile phone - that is not fully playing the game of business. Blind spots and biases emerge.
We can look to the most famous dot collector of our time to appreciate the value of collecting dots far and wide.
Master of the Maze
Pac-Man, the player-controlled character in the famous video game, navigates a maze filled with dots and dangers lurking around each corner.
Pac-Man’s goal is simple yet challenging: eat all the dots in the maze while avoiding the ghosts that chase him. Each dot consumed takes him closer to completing the level, but it’s the ‘energizer’ power pellets at the maze’s corners that give him the real power to reverse the chase, turning his pursuers into the pursued.
This game is more than just entertainment; it’s a metaphor for gathering and leveraging business intelligence.
In a connected world, vital insights - your dots - can come from anywhere. Your market, competitors, talent, collaborators, trends, investors, geopolitical shifts, regulatory changes, and emerging technologies emerge far beyond where you live and work.
Looking at a map of the world:
Where in the world do you collect your dots?
Are they close to where you are?
Or do you venture out, exploring the wider maze?
Do you have noticeable gaps?
If you focus primarily on local dots, like a Pac-Man sticking to only part of the maze, you miss the ‘energizers’ - the game changers.
For instance, if you’re based in Australia, where I am currently located, and concentrate only on Australian-centric and local sources for market intelligence and insights, you’re confining yourself to a fragment of the global maze.
The ghosts - risks and opportunities - won’t limit themselves to your chosen section of the maze. They’ll emerge from anywhere and everywhere. Focusing locally might keep you safe from immediate threats, but it won’t prepare you for the global ones, which are increasing in prevalence, nor will it reveal the full spectrum of global opportunities.
Collect and Connect
Since the game’s development in 1979, Pac-Man has collected the equivalent of approximately 4 trillion dots. Each dot, being about 1 millimetre in size, means Pac-Man would have travelled roughly 100 million kilometres, equivalent to over 2,500 times around Earth. Quite the traveller!
It is however crucial to do more than just travel, collecting dots.
In business, it is the ability to connect these dots across a broad spectrum that strengthens your perspective, offering the power to foresee, adapt, and innovate. Collecting dots from a wide array of sources enhances your worldview, transforming your business approach from reactive to proactive.
When making decisions, ask yourself:
Do I have the full picture? Is my view limited or expansive? Stagnant or strategic?
We live at a time when AI leverages global data, collecting and connecting dots continuously to think and act globally. For leaders, there has never been a more important time to think and act globally to lead here, there, and everywhere. Ambitious goals become harder to achieve with blind spots and biases.
By strengthening your perspective, you gain the power not just to see more, but to do more. That is a superpower in our world where leaders have more dots to deal with and ghosts to contend with.
Form a Personal Advisory Network
It’s challenging for busy leaders to collect and connect more dots. One of the easiest ways to do this more seamlessly, driving a strategic edge, is to form a personal advisory network.
If you consider your advisors, formal or informal, where are they from? Are they limited to your company, industry, or country? Or are they diverse, reflecting global innovation hubs, high-growth regions of the world, and places where top talent or emerging impact-driven investors exist?
As a business leader who has instant strategic access to the world, you gain a competitive edge. With an expanded worldview, you can make more informed, strategic decisions.
Collect more dots.
Be better at connecting dots.
