Photo credit: Kevin Rosseel

When people get mad with you, they often tell you to “grow up.” Well, you have no real choice in the matter. Each day you are a day older — a day more more ‘adult’ — whether you want that to happen or not. But is being an adult always such a great thing?

Children have most of the fun. They’re encouraged to play and to learn, two of the greatest sources of excitement and pleasure that there are. Adults are expected to give up play in favor of ’serious things’ like work — which usually means doing things they don’t want to do, at times when they don’t want to do them, for people they don’t much like, in return for a level of payment they don’t believe is adequate.

Why be child-like?

Children are encouraged to use their imaginations freely: to express themselves creatively, constantly experimenting with fresh ideas. Adults who try doing this are usually labeled ‘oddballs’ or ‘weirdos’ and watched suspiciously for signs of behavior they could be fired for.

Children are expected to learn; adults, heaven help them, are expected to know. Maybe that’s why so many adults believe that learning stops with the end of physical childhood, so that they have to rely on knowledge gained many years ago to see them through the demands they face. It’s well known that play is one of the most powerful forms of learning available to us. So why do training courses still consist mostly of people sitting at desks and tables, listening to ‘teacher’ pontificate? Isn’t that more about control than effectiveness?

Creativity comes naturally to nearly all children. Adults find it much tougher. This is usually because adults are too self-conscious and self-critical to let themselves go and play with ideas and possibilities. You don’t expect children constantly to self-censor their remarks and suggestions through fear of losing face if they say something wrong. A good many adults stay silent rather than face even the possibility of being thought ’silly’ by everyone else. As a result, vital thoughts remain unspoken and critical information stays hidden.

Children are readily forgiven for making mistakes, where adults have sour notes inserted in their personal files. Since the only way never to make a mistake — well, almost never — is to stick rigidly with what you already know, this attitude crushes innovation or change before it starts. I suspect the real reason why so many organizations cling to worn-out ideas and approaches, long after it’s become plain that they are doing nothing but harm, is that everyone is too afraid to make a mistake.

About the only fun thing adults get to do that children don’t is have sex — and that’s not usually seen as acceptable on company premises or during office hours.

What would it be like at work if everyone stopped being so adult?

It ought to be more fun for a start; certainly more playful, more spontaneous, more creative, and far more devoted to learning, creativity and exploration — all the things that organizations say they aspire to, but typically frown on when any employee takes them at their word.

There would be more time devoted to experimentation and exploration; less to cataloging the past and producing files full of ex post facto explanations of why whatever went wrong wasn’t anyone’s fault — more energy expended on facing up to new ideas and less on covering tender executive butts.

More of the excitement would be genuine, driven by the joys of curiosity and exploration; less would be faked in order to play the required game and fit in with what the boss expects. What is often called the ‘innocence’ of children is really another name for honesty and authenticity. It takes children some time to learn adult habits of concealment. What else they learn from adults isn’t so very wonderful either: putting on an act, playing politics with others, exploiting people’s honesty, climbing to the top over the bodies of colleagues.

Whatever children do, they tend to do with a passion. They throw themselves into activity, holding nothing back. Sometimes they get hurt that way, but more often they extract levels of pleasure from what they do that seem wonderful to the adults around them. As we grow older, we learn instead to hold ourselves back all the time. Where we were once brave, we become timid; where we were passionate, we become tepid in our enthusiasm. We’re so busy avoiding making fools of ourselves, we forget to enjoy life.

I know some of you are also thinking there would be all the petty cruelties and tantrums that children indulge in. Children are often naughty and willful. They can be sly when it comes to avoiding adult displeasure. But I’ve seen just as many hissy fits, temper tantrums and examples of petty cruelty and spite perpetrated by somber adults wearing business suits and seated in offices on the Executive Floor. There are some aspects of childish behavior that people never seem to grow out of.

Should be everyone’s aspiration to become more child-like and less childish as they grow older? I think so. I think you should forget being an adult all the time. If your organization disapproves, the adult thing is, of course, to conform to expectations. The childish response is a temper tantrum. How about the child-like response then: to stay exactly as you are and innocently look around for somewhere to spend your life that’s not run by the likes of Ebenezer Scrooge?

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