Yes, I Can

I was watching a cookery program with my younger daughter and her elder brother, whose feigned interest was so easy to see through. He was far more concerned with getting the latest premiership team news on his phone but I chose to ignore this and dragged him into our conversation anyway. The host of the cookery program, a celebrated chef, was praising one of the junior ‘chefs’ (a child who couldn’t have been more than 11 years old) that his pasta dish was one of the best he had ever tasted. Not one of the best made by a child but by anybody, even other chefs. This got me thinking. How did this child make a dish so much better than so-called experts? I turned to my children and asked them a question which I know has a very obvious answer. “What makes adult cooks better than young cooks?” At least generally. And of course they blurted out the obvious, which were all absolutely correct. Adult chefs have more know-how, as a result of age, experience and so on. I then asked the question which took us to where I actually wanted to go. “Why is it that at times, children cooks produce magically good dishes that blow seasoned chefs totally out of the water? What enables them to achieve this?” Thankfully, they both pretty much got it, so I didn’t have to spend the rest of the evening agonizing over why I’ve been spending quite so much on their school fees…Lol. Still, I tried to explain further and put it in my own words, just to give them greater clarity of understanding. Children are by nature less held captive by convention. They are more likely to try something that adults wouldn’t dare try – all because they (adults) have been taught over time, the things that work and those that supposedly don’t. Sometimes, it even goes beyond what they’ve been told. Experience, which we place so much premium on, may have conditioned their minds to accept what works and what apparently doesn’t. Numerous failed attempts could have evaporated the last drop of adventure in them and whipped them into the line of conventional thinking. Children on the other hand are not constrained by such. To them, anything is possible once they can imagine it. Rather than waste time staring at a knotty issue and thinking of the pros and cons of taking this or that action, they just get on with it, without doubting that they will succeed. Unlike adults, they’re not hampered by 1001 reasons of why it won’t work. They just make it happen because they refuse to entertain the thought of it not working.

In that wonderful book, Nudge, by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, we learn that the authorities at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam came up with an ingenious strategy to tackle the problem of careless ‘aiming’ into the urinals by male travellers who patronize their public lavatories. I want to believe they must have already trod the usual route of putting up notices and soliciting the cooperation of their patrons but hadn’t enjoyed much success. They therefore employed a method which took everybody’s eyes off the problem they were trying to tackle but instead appealed to the little boy within all of us men, who don’t just love playing games but always want to win. A strategically positioned and very realistic image of a housefly was etched in each urinal and because boys will always be boys, irrespective of their age, their attention shifted to ‘aiming’ at the fly as soon as it caught their eye. Little did they know that it was simply a nudge for them to aim correctly. Careless shooting which had always left the floor in a terrible mess was reduced by a staggering 80% and essentially became history from that point onwards. Clever, eh? Exasperated after having tried so many different strategies and failed, it was time to think out of the box. It was time to try a less frontal and less obvious approach. But was it simple? Very. It’s one of the many solutions we hear about that makes us ask yourself, “why didn’t I think of that?”