By Katia Del Rivero

As April begins, right in the middle of spring, we dedicate a day to celebrate our little ones. So I will take this chance to make a reflexion on some characteristics that, in my opinion, we should remember from the youth, from those who are not socialized fully yet.

A Future World With Minds from the Past

It’s no news that the world is changing at a fast pace. The technological development and the impact it has on everyday life, organizational development, and the way we work. These invite us to look in new ways.

The thing is, at least in my experience, or thought models are not evolving at the same pace.

Facing a changing world with the thinking forms from the past places us at a vulnerable spot.

From my perspective, it is not about comfort. Actually, I don’t think the social construction of comfort zones is useful. It’s not about change resistance either, I believe that we love change, starting from our own cells that move all the time.

I believe it has to do with safety and survival in a world where we are trying to face unknown scenarios with known forms.

Your Brain Goes Back to Known Things in Order to Survive

In a world where the speed and complexity of stimuli have increased, your brain will most likely look for known things in order to survive.

It goes back to things it’s lived, experimented and tried before that worked. The reason is quite simple. It wants to feel capable of responding to the environment while it takes care of itself and life.

For those of you who immediately think this is silly, don’t rush yourselves, it isn’t. It’s a wonderful survival mechanism.

The great paradox is that if we only go back to known mechanisms, we have few different expectations of life. We stay in what we know, in routine, then our brains have “little repertoire” of answers and experiences.

This is the reason why those who were raised in closed social, religious, politics or cultural environments can be barely open to difference and tag it as something “bad” or “dangerous” what is different. Mainly because they don’t have intern files that allow them to react properly and they fill threatened.

Well one of those mechanisms, very common in organizations, is “we’ve always done it this way.” Why do we cling to them as our life depended on it? Because we feel like that’s true. If we don’t feel capable in an uncertain world, then we go back to what we know in order to secure our survival.

The thing is in the actual world, many of these known forms, will most likely, take us to places where development, innovation and answer speed are little fertile for life.

The Wonderful Challenge of the Unknown

When you were a kid, you had few “stored” experiences, so the richness of the world lay on discovering it, on experimenting it.

Now that I’m sharing life with a baby again, I notice her ability for “new experiences”. If a few seconds ago she doesn’t get food and cries, two seconds after getting food, she will ask for it again with the confidence that this will happen. She doesn’t stay in history, she trusts in the answer of the future.

It doesn’t seem like her experiences condition the future. She doesn’t ask herself if she was the reason she didn’t get the food at the moment she needs it, she asks for it and asks for it strongly. She is not limited to one behavior only. Her repertoire of answers and behaviors when she’s only one month old is extraordinary to build a new experience.

She knows she is capable for life, she knows she deserves what she needs to live, she feels capable of exploring new possibilities, because she is in a safe place.

It’s impressive the flexibility a human being can find in a safe place. And is also mesmerizing the flexibility a human being can find in a dangerous life. He/she does what it takes to survive.

How Are We Going to Make it Now?

As adults, we have “adapted” ourselves, we’ve stored so many experiences and forms, that in a world we’ve co-built unsafe and challenging, seem useful to survive, because someone else was successful with them.

We forget that these are behaviors that were useful in a specifical time an place, and that will not necessarily work in a different time and place.

If in your organization “We’ve always done it this way” is a common phrase, I invite you to destroy it or at least add a new question “How are we going to face this new situation?” or give a step forward. “How do we create new conditions to make it in a different way?”

The more open I am to co-create different environments and forms, the more I increase the capability of enoughness and the ability for life and the uncertainty it entails.

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