In the early days of blogging we used to link a lot to each other. Individuals welcomed different points of view, voice, and style, and peer bloggers. Memes were fun ways of revealing yourself to others.

This is not just just some nostalgic thought about how we were, it is a data point in the conversation about how connections stimulate creativity and expand our thinking. Which in turn shows up in the quality and variety of the work we do.

Is it possible to each contributing three slides to a deck and call that collaboration? When often one team has no idea of what is going on with the other?

The ability to connect all brand activities into a positive-sum experience for customers demands a collaborative approach. Limited budgets, time, and resources demand creativity. In turn, that means better communication and collaboration.

We worship heroes and individuals with seemingly super powers; take a look under the hood of any great work, and you will see the efforts of a team.

So if you want to make your work product better and do more of it, you need to take a look at what you signal with your culture and incentives.

You need to make connections visible within your firm beyond the org chart. Look at how information flows (or not), how you structure opportunities for hand raisers, and you will likely see areas of opportunity where some may see areas of overlap.

Then you may want to make more of them possible.

Having a central digital place where to build a body of work is a good metaphor for connection, and it is even more valuable now that social networks make it super easy to disperse rather than focus, to hit buttons and be done without (often) even reading or acting on the information.

Using social as currency has the potential to be an interesting way to rebalance what the value of social interactions could be — actions designed to discover content, make connections visible, and build relationships. It may even be an incentive to use blogs again more for thinking and building community than to mainly build traffic, clicks, and page views.

This has been on my mind for a while and I am doing something about it by reaching out more and creating more opportunities to collaborate, connect, stay curious.

For example, in the last two weeks, I read five books I kept meaning to read, connected a half dozen people who I thought should meet, and reached out to a dozen people in my network to listen for a chance to help.

How do you go about making connections visible so you can get your creative juices going, increase the likelihood of collaboration?

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Valeria is an experienced listener. She designs service and product experiences to help businesses rediscover the value of promises and its effect on relationships and culture. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. Book her to speak here.