How to facilitate greater innovation by thinking like a child

In a popular children’s show called, “Max and Ruby”, two bunny siblings encounter everyday challenges together in the most annoyingly wholesome ways. What I found interesting about the show is that Max and Ruby’s parents are never mentioned or seen throughout the entire series. I instantly thought, oh no… are their parents completely out of the picture leaving a pre-teen sister to care for her toddler brother? It looks like they inherited the house and are somehow gathering food successfully, so that’s good? But also — how devastating!

Then I decided to google it.

The creator of Max and Ruby, Rosemary Wells, said in an interview that she intentionally leaves the parents out of the show because children tend to solve problems in different ways when adults are not around. Unique solutions develop when little minds interpret problems vs. being guided by adults who solve the same ol’ problems in the same ol’ ways.

Quite often, I find myself and other designers getting caught in a loop.

We have a lot of experience and knowledge, but sometimes we just can’t get out of our own brains - especially when we must innovate on something we’re very familiar with.

It’s easy to look at something new and critique it. Fresh eyes always see flaws. But sometimes it’s difficult to entertain new or experimental ideas when you and your team are in the thick of all of the complexity and rich history that comes from working on a long-term product or design solution.

This is where I’ve found that thinking like a child helps.

As professional creators, there are three characteristics from children that we can leverage to make our solutions more innovative, holistic, and hopefully spark that coveted “Aha!” moment when we feel like all hope is lost.

• Make time for play
• Learn from everyone
• Question everything

Make time for play

It’s well documented that play is important for childhood development, but recently researchers have started documenting the benefit of play for adults. This includes increased happiness, less stress, more creative thinking and lower risk of burnout. Sounds amazing, right?

But what does “play” look like for adults specifically in the work environment? How do we incorporate such an abstract, childlike concept to help us solve problems in highly technical and stressful environments?

LEGO has invented a workshop that illustrates the benefits of play to help teams innovate. In a nutshell, the facilitator of this workshop will ask a series of questions around a particular topic, and participants answer by building visual representations of their answer using LEGOs. There is no right or wrong answer, just exploration. The workshop continues by “building” upon each participant’s visual answers to delve deeper into the topic.

By forcing teams to abstractly think through a concept using a familiar (and fun) medium from childhood, we remove the little details and built-up tension that often stifles the consideration of forward-thinking concepts.

It’s important to get the work done, but better outcomes and outlooks evolve when individuals and teams also find importance in, simply, having fun.

“There’s a reason why adult play exists in modern society”, says Lynn Barnett, a research professor at the University of Illinois. “At work, play has been found to speed up learning, enhance productivity and increase job satisfaction; and at home, playing together, like going to a movie or a concert, can enhance bonding and communication.”

Learn from everyone

Every week I take my one-year-old son to gymnastics, and every week the teacher attempts to get ten tiny, squirmy maniacs to do anything that resembles coordination and technique. Without fail, one of the kids will completely disregard the teacher and do something super cool, like breaking out in a flailing dance move or jump-kicking a foam block. Within a matter of seconds, most of the kids start to do the same thing while improvising on it each time. By the end of class, every kid has contributed to a coordinated system of jumps, kicks, and booty bumps that never would have been as epic if just the one kid continued on his own.

Children have very limited knowledge of the world and living in it, so they obsessively observe and mimic others of all ages while they build a foundation of knowledge to inform their decisions.

There’s an unfortunate shift that happens as we get older. We become overly confident too soon. We’ve learned a hell of a lot already, so many of us just stop learning and continue “do-ing”.

This can greatly impair our ability to innovate when we are faced with a challenge. We pull from past experiences but face roadblocks when attempting to visualize what is possible if it hasn’t happened yet. Especially if we are siloed in the decision making process.

By focusing on continuous, never-ending growth by prioritizing learning and collaboration, we stop relying solely on our own knowledge to make decisions and learn to embrace and evolve upon new ideas that we may have previously scoffed at.

Question everything

Children love to ask “why” and question our very essence to the core. “Why do I need to eat broccoli?” “Why is the grass green?” “Why does everyone hate the ending of Game of Thrones?”. It’s annoying, but effective.

Years back, the team and I were diligently working on a long-running feature. We were given a list of requirements and started churning away adding in new buttons here and redesigned icons there. Since we were running around with our heads on fire trying to hit a deadline, we forgot to chill out for a second and ask why we were making these changes in the first place. As a result, we had very little understanding of the vision and received feedback from users that our shiny new designs felt segmented and confusing. Everything looked great but the experience wasn’t intuitive. Why did we change the UI in the first place?

After aligning on the larger vision, I love to invite more technical folks into design reviews because they always ask questions about the nitty gritty and, if needed, challenge the direction we are taking. By nature, their jobs involve specifically making every little piece of the UI and backend come to life and work correctly, so they must have very specific understanding of everything.

It’s nerve-wracking to have your solutions nit-picked, but at the end of the day, a more well-rounded and solid design solution emerges.

As designers, it’s also important that we nit-pick direction handed over to us so that we aren’t just making things look shiny and pretty. We’re intentionally solving problems and truly innovating within our industries.

Learning from those with experience is valuable, but there is something to be said about how a blank slate solves problems with little direction. Children can be annoying, gross and chaotic — but they’re just trying to figure out how to navigate this crazy world we all live in, and that can lead to some creative and surprising outcomes.