Engage the Disconnect

The Mystery of Connection

It’s incredibly powerful. It can heal the deepest wounds and motivate people to achieve more than they ever dreamed or imagined. It’s essential for success on any level. It's the wonder of human connection. 

Relationships are built or destroyed based on our ability or lack of ability to connect. Workplaces and organizations are either highly effective or terribly dysfunctional because of this simple, yet perplexing truth.

Deep down, connection is what every one of us seeks. While engagement with others is enticing and attractive, we struggle to find it. It appears that there is a mystery that surrounds our need to connect.

Understanding this intangible thing may seem a bit intimidating, even illusive. We have gaps in our lives – those deep chasms that separate us from our loved ones, our friends, our coworkers and our organizations.

Can we connect to the other side? Some of us spend our whole lives on that quest. But I believe a better question is “are we willing to connect?” Are we willing to make the investment to understand and execute simple practical principles that will bridge the gap in our relationships both personally and professionally?

 How is it that a team of athletes with inferior talent can defeat a team full of athletes with superior skills or talent? Why does a company with few resources and no Ivy League business graduates achieve incredible success and consistently out perform their competitors? How can a married couple withstand the difficulties and struggles of everyday life and grow stronger as they walk through the adversities?

To find the answer we must first take a look at our society in general. Through the years we have made unbelievable advancements through technology and innovation, however, our need for authentic engagement transcends time and invention.

Technology has its limits

It would be easy to believe just because we live in this remarkable technologically advanced age we are connected. We presume modernity and an advanced society would fix our problems. While our tactical connections have never been better, many of our personal and professional relationships still struggle to find that mystical thing called connection.

A brief review of modern innovations show the primary motivation was to enhance connection. Look at communications. News of the end of the Civil War took nearly two weeks to reach the last military outpost, couriers bringing the word by foot, horseback, wagon and train. From Pony Express riders to the first tap-tap-tap of the telegraph to Albert Bell’s wired telephone to fiber optics to satellite data transfers, we’ve been obsessed with communication that is faster. Today, we can thumb out a message on a device in our palm and it can access nearly anyone across the world in seconds. 

And the innovations in transportation were a quest to help us connect, bringing distant people, resources, and goods to the near world. It took the ancient mariners centuries to traverse the globe, sailing into unknown waters beyond the edge of the map. Each of them would expand a little more of the known, diminishing the unknown, drawing one shoreline at a time on the map. Pioneers would head off westward early in spring in a mad dash to beat the winter snows. Some settled their claim with a stake.

Others pressed on, hearing the call of the frontier.  In 1869, the Golden Spike marked the coming together of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific train lines, connecting the East to the West, allowing uninhibited train travel for the first time across the continent. Today, one could take any two points on the map and get there with ease either by air, train, or automobile. We now have the ability to connect across the globe and beyond.

So why the disconnect?