Collect widely
Build a larger inventory of tools, disciplines, experiences, stories, and patterns instead of learning only inside one professional boundary.
Current cover direction. The book remains in development.
In development
Collect Dots. Connect Dots. Create Something New.
The world organizes knowledge into disciplines. Problems do not.
The hardest problems rarely belong neatly to technology, business, design, psychology, finance, government, education, or any other single field. D.O.T.S. explores what becomes possible when we learn widely enough to recognize that a problem in one domain may share an underlying structure with a problem somewhere completely different.
The goal is not to find clever similarities. It is to find structural ones—and then test whether the connection survives contact with the real problem.
Key themes
Broad learning becomes useful when connection is disciplined.
See structure
Look beneath surface similarity. The useful connection is often a shared underlying structure, tradeoff, or problem pattern.
Transfer selectively
Ask what travels, what breaks, what must be adapted, and what does not belong.
Synthesize usefully
Novelty is not the objective. A connection matters when it produces a clearer decision, stronger system, or genuinely useful new possibility.
A high-level thinking sequence
Deconstruct → Observe → Transfer → Synthesize
This is the public thesis, not the full method. The discipline is to understand the problem, look beyond the expected domain, test structural fit, and adapt rather than copy.
Deconstruct
Understand the real structure of the problem rather than accepting its surface description.
Observe
Look across disciplines and experience for other places where that structure appears.
Transfer
Identify which principles travel—and where the analogy stops working.
Synthesize
Adapt what is useful and create something appropriate for the actual context.
Two principles at the center
Collect broadly. Transfer carefully.
Collect Dots. Connect Dots. Create Something New.
Broad learning creates a larger inventory of tools, patterns, experiences, and analogies to draw from.
Do not ask what field a tool belongs to. Ask what problem it can solve.
The useful question is whether the underlying structure fits—not whether a method comes from the expected discipline.
An unlikely connection
Marketing + preschool planning
A tool used to understand consumer preferences can also help people make difficult public-policy choices when the underlying problem involves competing preferences, tradeoffs, and configurations. The disciplines are different. The structure of the problem may not be.
Explore the origin idea →