More than one right answer…
I love riddles. They often catch us in our assumptions when an answer is not the first response that comes to mind. They challenge us to put-in a bit of thought before falling into an expected response.
And sometimes it’s good to look for the riddle in our most basic assumptions – the ones that we might have otherwise not thought to question.
Cue-in my favourite learning tool: a drawing of my son’s from when he was 6-years-old.
I don’t think it is much of a stretch to think that 99.9% of the people/children working on this activity book would have believed – and drew-in – a road or bridge as the missing component.
Of course, there might be some who claim that the artist showed a serious lack of understanding of basic physics and is a potential menace to civil engineering by adding a lane for bikes instead of a bridge for cars & trucks. Some might believe that parents (& teachers) might do better to limit children’s exposure to colouring- & activity-books and hand out blank pages to un-confine our children’s minds. (Don’t worry, we did that too.)
But somewhere I read (sorry, can’t recall the source at the moment…) that the job of the leader …the creative… is not to think “outside of the box” but to re-think how to conceive something great/wonderful/inspiring within the actual parameters of “the box”.
And that’s what I saw when I looked at my son’s drawing. (And, boy what a keeper I found!)
The lesson for me is a recognition that we need to encourage – especially with children and teenagers – a capacity, and perhaps a responsibility to remind ourselves to think creatively before settling on rote, or expected solutions.
Very often, there is more than one right answer.
- Posted in: leadership
- Tagged: art, bike lanes, bikes, children, creativity, leadership, thinking outside the box, youth
