“It’s A Duck!”

Here is an experiment we have done many times, with both kids and adults. We ask them to close their eyes and dip their hand into a large tub filled to the brim with hundreds of random LEGO pieces. The instruction is precise: “Pick 5 pieces.” They are asked to arrange the 5 pieces on the table, and now comes the second instruction: “Using these 5 LEGO pieces, make a Duck. You have 60 seconds to complete the task.”

The adults look at the pieces on the table, look at your face, and repeat the instruction: “Make a Duck?” “A Duck?” and then “OK….” And then they dutifully get to work. They try various combinations, stick the pieces around, keep looking at how their other colleagues are faring, laugh at themselves, and the exasperation peaks with the “Last 10 seconds!” announcement. They simply throw up their hands, and declare that it is impossible to make a Duck with these 5 pieces.

Some want another chance at picking 5 more pieces. Most of them pose a very technical question: “How can 5 random pieces make a specific object like a Duck?” Then comes the competitive spirit: “Have you ever had anybody actually do this correctly?”

Or, a very worried, “What are you testing here?” Among a couple of thousand adults who have taken this assignment with us, we are yet to hear one adult declare, “There! This is my Duck!”

On the other hand, the kids (typically 5 – 8 years old) jump in with all earnestness once the clock starts ticking. They freely take ideas by watching others, and at the end of the 60-second deadline, most kids (if not all of them) have a structure with all the 5 pieces in a ‘formation’. “Have you got your Duck?” we ask, and many heads nod in affirmative.

We move to the first of the ‘structures’ and ask the child, “So, is this your Duck?” She says, “Yes.” “But”, we say in mock protest, “a duck needs to have a bill, a pair of legs…” She shows one end of the structure, calls that the bill, and goes on to describe the rest of the anatomy of a Duck.

The supreme confidence as she describes her Duck is priceless, and must be mentioned. As French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau reminds us: “Although modesty is natural to man, it is not natural to children.”

The child’s attitude is instructive. Her attitude and tone is screaming loud and clear: “I have made a Duck, and I see a Duck here. If you can’t see it, I am willing to show you my Duck, as I see it.” The corollary can be less conciliatory: “I see a Duck here. If you don’t see it, it is your problem, not mine!” “All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up,” says Pablo Picasso. 

The adults are handicapped by a need to make a Duck that the people and the world around them will acknowledge and accept as a Duck.

In this compulsion to gain acceptance, adults fail to give ‘play’ to their view, their imagination and their construct of the world. Gene Fowler, American journalist, highlights an attitude of kids that is worth emulating: “What is success? It is a toy balloon among children armed with pins.”

As a child, all of us would describe the world as we ‘see’ it. The degeneration of adults happens by allowing others’ view of the world to trigger our thoughts, shape our relationships and dictate our responses. When we are more concerned about everyone’s judgment and opinions about us, we will never make our Duck with all the random pieces that each one of us have been given.

Just watch a kid, and become one. Paulo Coelho sees at least three things we can learn from kids: “to have a joy without a reason, to be busy with something all the time and to demand – with all power – what (we) want.”

Ramesh is a Corporate Speaker for Leadership and Strategic Meets. Ramesh’s approach and style are largely to do with interpreting and elaborating the factors that affect organizations, trends in the industry that the organizations need to watch out for and the methods that they can use to achieve their goals. Read his other posts here.