By Katia Del Rivero

Now that we are inviting you to remember some of the characteristics you had as a child, and that may come in hand while facing the future’s uncertainty. We would like you to make a reflexion on our — often forgotten — ability to resolve our differences.

Turning Difference Into Abyss

Imagine watching three screens at the same time. In the three screens, the same scene is playing, an argument between kids.

In the first scene, the kids are amid 2 to 3 years. In the second screen, the kids are about 7 or 8 years. And in the last screen, you can see teens within 13 and 14 years.

What difference can you notice among these three scenes? While this could be different, you’ll most likely see something like this:

1. You’ll most likely notice the differences don’t last long. In what may seem like a high capacity for flexibility to start a new interaction, leaving behind the previous conflict even if it happened seconds before. You can see how they try again. They change the game, the rules, the forms. They try again and continue playing together.

2. In the second screen, the kids have different behavior. Their constructions are different. They don’t show the same flexibility. Now they show defensive behaviors that can be experienced as hurtful. It is very likely that a dynamic is observed where one of them feels devalued and the other feels overvalued.

3. In the third screen, we’ll see differences once again. It is common to find groups of teens arguing, competing, considering themselves superior. Sometimes if they’re angry they can insult and even hit each other. On one hand, they behave according to the group’s behavior, and on the other hand, they are distinguished from others in a framework of better/worse.

What’s different? The kids between two and three years in see the differences as something irrelevant. It was just an experience that invited them to explore new forms. In the process of socialization, they learned that differences hurt, tear apart, and should be taken carefully.

Facing this knowledge, we adults, will most likely, continue and learn how to work in silos, in preserves, in isolation, only with those who think similar to us or with whom we have few differences.

These could become quite comfortable, safe, and even predictable. And it also reduces significantly the possibility to grow, challenge yourself, open new thought and experience dimensions.

Collaboration: the Challenge of Digitalization

Why these subject of working in isolation is a problem facing digitalization? Why the fact that we don’t know how to close differences places us in a disadvantage? Why the time we take in closing our differences can make us waste opportunities?

Mainly because in the world of digitalization is not the largest one who survives, but the fittest one. And by fit, we understand the one that adapts better, in a more efficient way and in less time. He who can flex and respond to the environment with a greater range of possibilities in the shortest time and knowing that he can do it again the next moment.

And for this to happen, it requires a diversity of talents, a diversity of perspectives, a diversity of capabilities. The differences placed in alignment and coordination facilitate this response collectively. And they are usually faster, more comprehensive and more functional than those offered individually.

That is to say, we require that childlike capacity — I insist, forgotten by many — to settle our differences as something unimportant and rather experience them as the opportunity to try again, to generate a new interaction, to adjust something in the interaction so that it works.

And how to generate this if we have forgotten this infantile capacity to look towards the future, to build and to try again trying to find how yes?

An Invitation to Remember

Some ideas that may be useful for you can be:

1. Ask yourself Is this really important enough to generate a conflict? And if I only see it as a distinction of perspectives, what opportunity emerges? When we were children we did not use to mean differences as conflicts.

2. If you feel upset at the difference, a key question is “What do I need at this time? What would make me feel with the possibility of ‘playing again’? “Usually the child does not question these issues, because he knows he is capable of life. Many of the meanings we give to situations are because we question ourselves through it … What if you do not? And if you know enough?

3. And my favorite … What would happen if instead of “engaging” in the difference you focus on the purpose to achieve? If you use difference as a form of future construction? When we were children, what we wanted was to play and we wouldn’t let what emerges in the game take away the game itself.

We will be delighted if you tell us if one of them worked for you.