The Doing Thing

I wrote this is 2009, still good and sitting it the drafts folder, hope it helps you as much as it helped me:

A recent Ted talk got me thinking, you can see it here, about how children interact with the world. My Theory of Everything is that everything is everything so you can succeed by knowing one thing immaculately. We often think that the one thing we should know should be important, and yet understanding something simple is easier and, as stated, something simple is everything.

Children are simple, maybe they hold the key to how we should act. In the video, there is a team building design exercise and the average kindergarten team out performs the average team of CEO's. Kindergarten students do it by iterative learning.

My wife ran Sunday school classes this weekend where all of the students gather together, just like the adults, and sing before heading off to individual classes. Except when they showed up that day, instead of singing, they had to all dance. Everyone participated exceptionally.

If you showed up at an adult church service (board meeting, project orientation, etc) and told everyone they had to dance I would be shocked to see 10% involvement. So whats the correlation between design and dance?

Fear.

As adults we are ready to put out a big design and fail (if we have to), shrug and say we did our best, and quit. Kid's do their best too, but they do it quickly and realize that it is not the best and continue trying. And the trying is where they beat us.

In school we teach the adult way: hand in one paper, do one art project, pick one sport, choose one college.

School is wrong, so wrong that in the design exercise recent MBA's did the worst.

School teaches us fear, and going into the business world teaches us fear plus money. It's time to dance, look a little stupid, realize our first try is not the best way, push past the fear and go again.