Implementing projects!
This is something we start to develop from a very early age, yet many are not good at it
From the age of about 18 months, intrepid toddlers begin the process of learning how to: have an idea, initiate a project, follow through, complete the project, and celebrate. Think toddler pushing a stool up to the kitchen bench, climbing up to the cookie jar, struggling to get the lid off, taking a cookie, climbing back down and then eating the cookie with great satisfaction.
If such a capability is not learned as we grow up then, as adults, we can struggle to get things done. A single element, or any combination, of the five steps may be missing and the project is unsuccessful or unsatisfying even if completed. We will all likely know people with great ideas, who start projects but never seem to finish them or those who seem paralysed, and struggle to get something off the ground at all. This deficit may come about because, as a child, we did not have the opportunity to develop this capacity or when we tried our efforts were constrained by adults or older siblings around us.
The importance of this capacity – we could call it implementing projects - is self-evident in its application in the modern world and is further emphasised by the fact we begin to learn this capacity as soon as we are old enough to act autonomously.
In the expression of twenty-first century skills provided by the World Economic Forum in 2015 (see a summary here), the elements of initiative and persistence are provided by developing this capacity.
The strange thing is that unconstrained, a child will have been developing this capacity for more than two decades before reaching physical maturity yet, that seems not to be the case for the great majority. In other words, the very natural development of young people is being systematically weakened.
It seems to me that it is the pervasive nature of illegitimate teacherly authority that is the root cause of this. We insist on telling children what to learn and how to learn when some of the capacities that are most important are simultaneously ignored or, worse, suppressed.
Rebuilding legitimate teacherly authority is a way to break this impasse.
John Corrigan is an expert in helping individuals to bring their whole of mind to their daily life and increase their effectiveness and the effectiveness of those around them. This expertise scales from the individual to the team to the organisation. At the core of this work is the concept and practice of teacherly authority. Earlier blogs can be found here.
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