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Think Differently and Act Effectively—Like a Six-Year-Old

Albert BarraMarch 9, 2020 · 2 min read
THE IDEA

A vintage telephone prompts two children to question outdated design—and offers a powerful lesson in creative thinking, simplicity and problem-solving.

Think Differently and Act Effectively—Like a Six-Year-Old
This weekend, while spending some time at home with my young son Aitor and my niece Martina, something happened that went unnoticed at the time but gradually proved tremendously enriching. The thing is, we have an old telephone at home—one of those period telephones that some of us keep as decorative objects because of their originality and beauty.   The fact is that they both recognised from its appearance that the device in question was a telephone. After all, there are toys nowadays with a handset on a cord and something like a microphone that you bring close to your mouth to speak. Even a computer, without going any further, has a similar system today. The amusing part came when I explained to the children how to dial a telephone number on a rotary-dial telephone, as was the case. They simply could not understand how human beings could have invented such a complicated device, and such a strange way of dialling a telephone number. Questions such as:
It would have been so much easier to put buttons on it for dialling…
They meant the keys. Of course, they did not know that at that time, people were already content simply to be able to speak to someone at a distance, even if it was complicated to do so. Having to use a dial to enter a telephone number was not a bad solution to a problem of that era. The second observation was the one that completely threw me:
Of course, without buttons, if you make a mistake when dialling… You can’t delete the number.
I did not attach much importance to this, but shortly afterwards I went over to the telephone at home—yes, a cordless, digital, state-of-the-art one. And there it was! My suspicion was confirmed: It had no delete key! It seems that a six-year-old child thinks and reasons differently from us adults. We take it for granted that, because we are adults, we know more, but thinking differently enables us to see solutions where others see only problems. In the end, Abraham Maslow’s phrase may well be true: “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. Innocence and humility lead us to creative solutions. I believe that is reason enough to start doing things a little differently, or at the very least, to make them as easy as six-year-old children would like them to be.
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