About a month ago I started volunteering for Junior Achievement, a fantastic organization that works to educate young people on business and economics concepts. Each week I get to spend an hour teaching 3^rd graders (8 and 9 year olds) about business. I can honestly say it’s the highlight of my work week and I’ve learned an incredible amount from them. After each session I furiously record ideas for future blogs on my phone before returning to work. Not all the lessons learned align to IT but I do think they align well to our working lives and are also just interesting insights.

Lesson One- Third graders have a longer attention span than a typical adult today (seriously)

This may surprise you but I’m convinced it is true. Yes, this is a generation (or two) after the MTV generation who is bred on absorbing only short bits of content at a time and unless it’s exciting they lose focus. But adults are way worse. The big difference is kids are forced to sit at their desks with these rudimentary instruments known as “pencils” and “paper”, while adults have one to three internet connected devices in their pockets. When adults get bored we pull out our smart phone and check email, Facebook, Twitter and play angry birds. Once we move our attention to our device the speaker or meeting attendees aren’t getting it back. This has been most obvious to me at recent conferences. If the presenter doesn’t engage the audience in the first five minutes the audience has essentially walked out the door and returned to their day job on their mobile device.

From an IT perspective this is critical to consider when IT is working with the business. Are you losing your audience in the technical details and putting them to sleep? Instead keep focused on the costs and value of an IT project. Or if you are giving a training class on a new technology, stick to real world use cases that describe the users current pains and how you will alleviate them.

Lesson Two- Kids want to answer questions even when they don’t know the answer

What has impressed me with the 3^rd grade class I work with is their eagerness to participate. If I ask a question almost every hand in the room goes up. But what impresses me even more is that half of them don’t even know the answer. Last week I called on a particular student who didn’t know the answer but started talking through their thought process aloud. This blew me away because adults rarely do that in meetings today. If we aren’t 100% sure our answer is correct we’ll keep quiet. I’ve sat in far too many meetings where there are no follow up questions or discussion because people are afraid to ask stupid questions or fear criticism. In the 3^rd grade class there are no penalties or criticism from other students when a someone can’t answer a question or even gives a wrong answer.

Think about this from an innovation perspective. The best teams and companies are those that allow sharing of ideas even oppositional ones. Talking through your thought process allows others to better understand your reasoning and take that thinking further. Remember it’s all about having ideas collide to create innovation.

And from an IT perspective, think about how your end users feel when they approach IT. Are they afraid to ask a question because they think it’s a stupid one? This is also important from a communication perspective, are you overcomplicating the terminology and that makes your users feel dumb? Make sure your communications, knowledge articles, catalog subscriptions and service descriptions are all in business user terminology so they feel comfortable when interacting with IT.