Culture of prototyping

Watching kids at play always seems to inspire me. There is a certain amount of ingenuity at work that is not marred by the shackles of organizational rules, hierarchy and bureaucracy. Anyways I was recently at a school and had the opportunity to watch kindergarteners play with blocks. It was amazing how they built things then broke them and rebuilt it a new way, there was a sense of mission in their actions and more importantly there was a search to built a perfect ‘something’… obviously I could not tell.

I remember watching my nephew pull apart a small matchbox series car, wheel first then the chassis and so on until he is ready to reassemble the broken car. As we grow older we loose that drive to prototype, we take the systems, the organizations we are in for what they are, rarely question and in some cases are told to make things work the way they are before we rearrange things over.

Organizations hire smart individuals and box them into molds, destroy their creativity and drive. It would be great we did not take anything to be perfect and developed a culture of prototyping, build a little, test a little and scale a lot!