I am frequently an advocate for the benefits of children playing video games. I realize that I am somewhat of an outlier but watching my children play I have seen them building real world skills like logical thinking and problem solving. Occasionally I will hear their pangs of frustration but I appreciate watching them strengthen their resolve as they work to overcome a task and complete an adventure. Admittedly there can be many challenges too but for the most part I see the positives outweighing the negatives. Until this weekend, I hadn’t really understood a negative impact of one particular type of game – the Kinect Sports games.
A couple of days ago I heard about another amazing example of a “child” showing us their own power of creativity to drive innovation and I thought about a recent experience playing a game with my son . A child’s ability to create a hypothesis, test, and verify process is no less than an adults and it may be improved since they are not bridled by the fear of failure. This year we have seen a couple of the most astonishing medical inventions come from work of teenagers! How do we continue to create an environment where they are able to discover, explore, and create? If their current pace of innovation continues maybe we will need to start referring to them as the MD-Generation?
Recently, a friend and former colleague and I were discussing how we had both learned so much more about leadership and leading people from children than we had from any other source: training, education, or on the job experience. Perhaps the last example was due more to the fact that we were deficient in strong developmental “leaders” at our mutual employer but I really think there is something to the simplicity of working with children versus the complexities of leading in business. This simplicity allows us to take action, quickly see the results and then to adjust accordingly if we don’t get a “good” outcome. It is almost like a little mini case study where we get to practice our techniques in real time.
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