Recently, I've been learning about the nature of work and Organisational Design (OD) from
Naomi Stanford, who has
a number of books and
an excellent blog on those topics. Naomi's
TEDx talk on the Future of Work from last October struck an unexpected chord with me.
In our house, every time we purchase anything that comes in a box, such as a pair of shoes, a TV or a blender, our children demand the box. They bloody love empty boxes and will fight bitterly over them. We're regularly forced to broker elaborate timeshare schemes or provide intermediation to enable shared custody of the empty boxes. We're not short of a toy or two in our house, my partner is a registered childminder so we have over 100 million different toys available for me to trip over. There are plenty of LEGO bricks left on the carpet for me to place the full weight of my body using just the ball of my naked foot.
To my children, a box can be a hideout, a bed for the cat, a new microwave for the wendy house, a robot costume or a new wardrobe for teddies and dolls. It's kind of a pain to have so many boxes lying around the house so I have to remove them every now and then while they are sleeping. But don't worry, they rarely notice because I only really take them away when they seem to have finished playing with them. And that's the thing. The value of a box isn't so much in playing with them, it's more the process of making something new with them. They just love to make stuff. They rarely plan what a box is going to be, they just tend to attack it with scissors, glue, string and shiny stickers and hope for the best. I wish I could still attack work in that kind of way, no plan, no vision, just a desire to go to work on something with intent.
Many modern toys are intensively designed, they come imbued with a hidden hand to guide play, saving you the trouble of actually using your own imagination. No small wonder the blank state of a shoe box demands to be reshaped and remodelled - it creates a vacuum that draws children to it like a freshly painted wall.
Being the kind of person I am, I used to encourage them to think about what they are going to do with a box before they start; to draw up what they want it to look like and write out the steps to plan how they are doing to do it. But to them that just makes their work more like work and less like play. Actually thinking about what they want to make is a tax they aren't really prepared to pay. I think in the long term they'll find out for themselves the benefits of planning this kind of stuff so I just stick to giving them ideas, supervising the use of scissors and finding other cool stuff around the house they could attach to their contraption. This seems more empowering and interesting to them.
To me, at least at a basic level, making something worth making is about getting into a pattern of thinking where everything else dissappears (i.e. flow). You try something, step back, evaluate, try something else, step back, evaluate, again and again forever (i.e. Make, Test, Learn). Or at least until you're happy with it. And then you look back at the thousands of decisions you made in the process and it means something to you. Maybe you're happy with it, maybe you're not, but at least it means something to you. And that's the bit that really matters. The next time you do it, the better you'll be at making something.
So about 6 months ago, their love of empty boxes extended into the virtual world. To virtually working, which is probably my son's favourite kind of working.
My initial concern about my two older children spending time on Minecraft was mostly selfish, I am constantly being asked "Dad, can you install this mod?". And I can't just go and do it. Minecraft isn't like your average Apple app or game on a website, there's lots of how-tos and poorly written guides on discussion forums that lead you down fruitless garden paths. It's all very open and home-made, which appeals to me yet my parental protective Internet spider-sense tingles every time Wilf's on a forum. This kind of thing is now a tax on my attention, but it feels like it could be worth it.
If my children are learning how to work, whether it's through building a giant nightclub in Minecraft or a cardboard box tank, then I'd rather they were doing that then staring at Adventure Time or The Amazing World of Gumball (despite how awesome these are).
Naomi put forward in her TEDx talk the idea that Minecraft may actually prepare children for future work. It would no doubt take a longitudinal study to learn if it really does, by which time Minecraft will be long-gone. But I think I'm going to make a simple bet and that's that learning how to make something is valuable and should be encouraged.
