Remember back when you were a baby? When sleeping 16 hours a day and stuffing your face was acceptable? The authors of the book Just Start: Take Action, Embrace Uncertainty, Create the Future are encouraging entrepreneurs to channel their inner-infant. According to their new article in Businessweek, as soon as we enter grade school, we are conditioned to solve problems using “Prediction Reasoning.” We assemble data, study it, and then come up with nice neat formulas to make estimates on the way a future event will turn out. But for those of us who have spent time in the business world (or the world, in general, for that matter), we know there are many things one simply can’t predict. When you were a baby, you knew and embraced this because everything was unknown. Did you figure out you hated Brussels sprouts by typing figures into your Fun-2-Learn Fisher Price laptop? Of course not! You face-planted right into your purée and quickly discovered Brussel sprouts are even less appetizing than the dog’s tail you bit moments before. Lesson learned and never to be repeated again.
And this “act into better thinking,” method can be used as a model for approaching any situation, especially in the realm of entrepreneurship. The book’s authors have deemed it “CreAction,” and it favors acting and creating evidence as a complement to our traditional solution-generating methods of thinking and analysis. Find out what you want, assess the resources you have already, use those resources and take small steps towards a goal. Most importantly, reflect on what you now know from taking that step. Does my goal need tweaking? Am I ready to move forward?
Who would have guessed that all along, your infant-self held the key to better business practices in those tiny little hands?
