Read the full transcript of Christian Wehner’s talk titled “Become a KIDULT – Rediscover The Magic of Childhood Wonder” at TEDxHHL 2024 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
CHRISTIAN WEHNER: I have 76 slides for the next 18 minutes, so rock and roll, you little knowledge nerds. I truly hate the fact that kids need naivety to survive, while adults kill naivety to survive. And I’m here today to say bye-bye. I say bye-bye to linearity.
Like, one of the most requested features for the last 15 years on LinkedIn was to use the data they are having out of 1 billion profiles. So the most requested feature was to build a tool out of 1 billion profiles again to say, “Hey, what’s the next best step in my career plan, right?” So if I want to become a CFO, which steps do I have to take along the way? And it turned out when LinkedIn looked at the data, and again, 1 billion profiles, not a thing, a pattern appeared.
And to me, that’s something really beautiful. Like, the data says nothing, because in most of the cases, there truly is no linear career path. I always thought that creativity is somehow my north star, my secret sauce, however you want to call it. But my grandfather told me something different.
Günther’s Lesson
Here he is. Günther, even when you’re not with us anymore, you’re still my hero. And when I was five years old, I did what every kid do. I mixed everything together what I can possibly find, right?
Vinegar, toothpaste, his shaving cream, yada, yada, yada. And I went to my grandfather and told him I invented a hair tonic. And yeah, instead of, like, it was a real chaos behind me, and instead of blaming me for the chaos, he was like, “Okay, give it a try.” So I gave him a little massage for five minutes, and then he was, “Okay, clean up the mess, and when you come back, we will have a look what happened.”
And when I came back, the incredible happened. My grandfather literally had hairs. And he even asked me to pull on it, if my solution is that they are solid, and they were quite solid hairs. And for years, probably a bit too long, to be honest, I believed that I invented a hair tonic.
And by the age of 11, 12, I asked him, “Hey, what was the secret, right?” And both starting to laugh, and when I was cleaning up my mess, my grandfather cut it off some chest hair, and my grandmother superglued it on the head. Oh, and this exercise for me, like, there are two learnings within.
The first one is, too often the competition of knowledge kicks in when somebody shares a wild idea with us, right? So we are trapped in knowledge, and we act with “yes but,” which is nothing else than “yes knowledge.” But, and sometimes, let me tell you, it’s really smart to be naive, because real innovation, evolution, comes from ignoring the limitations. And this starts with “yes and,” instead of “yes but.”
And the second learning from this exercise was that I found my love to naivety.
The Power of Naivety
Naivety is often seen as a kind of weakness, but I think it’s a fantastic shield against the “Yeah, yeah, but we always have done it this way” mentality we often face, right? And the power of naivety, it’s not a childish game we play. It’s not escape into a dream world. It’s a powerful tool.
And like a tree, for example, has to grow in two directions at the same time. So first, the seed grows away from light, and the roots have to really have to push to the dirt. There’s a lot of resistance. So that’s the rough part.
And when this is done, then the seed will, like, go upwards, downwards light, and there’s nearly no resistance anymore. And for me, this is a super, super cool symbol for our naivety. Our naivety is like the first set of roots, right? So our early deep grounded knowledge, while the rational knowledge, that’s our trunk.
But here’s something where humans differ from nature. We let our roots dry by growing up, and we see them as something childish. And by doing so, we kill a huge part of our inner system. So we have been told naivety is stupid.
We have been told, like, if you grew up in the 90s or 2000s, we, like, everyone was making jokes about the naive blondes. And this picture is still in our head. Thank you, Kelly Bundy. And last but not least, some people see us as something childish, right?
But if you actually build a word cloud around the word “naivety,” there are so many super strong and amazingly positive attributes. You will face simplicity, openness, trustfulness, creativity, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. Every manager would lick his fingers to have attributes like this in his team. And let me tell you, innocence brings forward innovation.
And in the worst case, come on, you were ending up taking a wrong turn, and you would see a landscape that you would never have experienced without. So the next time when change hits you in the face, I want you to put the lens or to bring you in the lens or to see it with the lens with your five years old you. For me, naivety, it’s not a childish thing. It’s not the naive blonde.
For me, it’s a beginner’s mind. And actually, there’s something, if you go in, there’s something called “shoushen” in the Zen Buddhism. And this means it’s a mindset free from the knowledge of weight. But it is, like it always is, only with awareness comes choice.
How Our Brain Works
And therefore, it’s important to understand how our brain works. Like, all of you are aware that we have two different sides of the brain, a left one and a right one, right?
But we also have seven different layers of intelligence within us. And two of them are super important when we grew up.
So within us, there’s something called a “fluid intelligence,” as psychologist Cattell describes it. And that’s the young intelligence, right? It’s based on focus, innovation, working memory, and so on and so forth. And the counterpart, that’s the “crystallized intelligence,” which is more or less based on trained knowledge we gained and experiences we had.
And what do you think when they, like, shake hands? At which age do we lose our childish intelligence? The peak of our childish intelligence is with 39. That’s surprising, isn’t it?
The good news is, we are all allowed to be childish. And to awake our inner kid, today, we will sign a kind of “naivety codex,” which is based on three core principles. And the first one is “unlearning.” Like, how should I say, in our constant quest for knowledge, we too often forget how important it is to let go of old habits.
The Three Pillars
And for me, it’s a little bit unlearning, like watching Bob Ross. Like, when come home way too late, a bit tipsy, you’re laying on the couch, and so there, at every single Bob Ross episode, there is the so-called “No, no, no, CCC moment,” right? So, you see a perfect landscape, and then he took out the brush, and a blue line here. And you start, “No, no, no, no, no.”
But suddenly, you start to realize that the new direction is way more beauty than the thing you thought you knew before. And that’s the CCC part. But I’m here to tell you, hey, knowledge generates ignorance. If you knew the end of the film, at the very beginning, your curiosity switched to energy-saving mode, and too often, knowledge generates ignorance.
Thank you so much, Rick Rubin, for teaching me this. And I think knowledge generates, there’s so much in, like too often, our knowledge guides us in the wrong direction, and by doing so, we miss tons of tons of tons of opportunities. The second pillar is about “connect.” Like, intuition is not a mystical gift out of nowhere without any basis or rational basis, right?
But the gift of intuition has been totally forgotten in our education systems. Like, for example, the smell of summer rain. We all love the smell of summer rain, do we? Like, not even my mother’s apple pie can compete with the smell of summer rain.
Sorry, Mama. But why do we find this particular smell so yummy? Is it the so-called “Proust effect” that kicks in here, which is like the effect that catapults or brings us back just to the memory by smell? Meh, it’s the right direction.
It goes way deeper. And unfortunately, it’s also not the allowance to go into the pub while it’s raining. So the connection is even deeper than beer. So there’s a flame within us that cannot be turned off.
And the answer why we find summer rain so yummy is super easy and super surprising. For our grand, grand, grand, grand, grand forefathers, it was super important, particularly in the hot summer months, to locate water sources. So the smell that makes us happy today is actually a surviving compass for our species. None of them would be here without this intuition.
So it’s still in us, but somehow we lost the message along the way. And same goes for creativity. In the late 60s, the George Mann creativity test shocked the foundation of what we knew about creativity. The George Mann creativity test, to be honest, sounds a little bit like a 90s commercial, but it was really an incredible lesson on creativity.
Creativity Test
So the NASA had to find the brightest and most creative minds for their employee base. But how on earth should we measure creativity? So what they did is they wrote a test and they did it together with 1,600 children. They measured them over a period from 10 years, from five to 15.
So what do you think? How many percent of the five-year-old kids passed the test with the level “creative genius”? So nearly 100% of them were creative genius. So what about the 10-year-old kids?
Again, the same kids with the same test. The number dropped down by two-thirds. And if you go to the 15-year-old kids, again, same kids, same test. The number again reduced themselves, decreased by 50%.
But it gets better or, let’s say, worse. They only also did the test with one million adults. And I guess it’s no surprise only 2% of them are still creative geniuses. By the way, the hat was a terrible idea in this weather.
So they did the test with one million adults, 2% are only creative geniuses. And what happens here? Somehow it seems that we’re unsubscribed from our childhood, right? And in fact, the muscle in our brain, which is responsible for, like, diversion thinking and for imagination, it’s a very well-trained muscle in our brain because that’s the muscle who’s active every single night when we are dreaming.
And as George Land wrote in his paper, we do not lose our creativity, we lose the access because there’s no free play anymore in our everyday lives. Same goes with the summer rain. So the muscle is well-trained and it’s up to you to even wake it up one day and not over your night, which brings me to my third pillar of our “nervity codex” we’re closing today, and that’s “professional rule-breaking.” Taking calculated risks can pay off big times.
Professional Rule-breaking
In fact, in the seat of the most chaotic ideas, often there is something truly remarkable. Like, for example, the statue, probably not the best thing I’ve ever seen in life, but turned out, holy cow, that’s beautiful. And one company that recently proved that professional rule-breaking can also lead or yield to competitive advantages is Tony’s Chocolate. They launched a limited edition and somehow, I’m not sure if you see it too, but somehow, to me, the limited edition looks a little bit similar but more to a different brand than Tony’s.
So what looks like a bold anti-Milka marketing stunt was just the beginning of a calculated turn, if you ask me. So of course, Milka’s mother company, Mondelez, spotted the packaging and they fired back with legal weapons, right? So they gave a lawsuit to Tony. And if you ask me, that was just what Tony was waiting for because now they can roll out their answer, which was, “Hey, Milka, pay farmers, not lawyers.”
So it was a media go with mine and I was in the global press top page, right, worldwide. So what Tony did with calculated risk-taking was took a limited edition, took it into a marketing tango, took it into a lawyer tango, a legal tango, and back to the marketing arm, and how sweet is that? So let me summarize it. The last 200 years was something like everything was so knowledge-based, right?
Everything was about knowledge. It was a huge competition of knowledge. Knowledge was hard to get, hard to share. People tried to defend knowledge with their elbows, put it into silos.
And by doing so, we more and more and more separated from others. And also in education, it was all about the right answer. Learning is training on answers. But if you see now that AI is popping up, that allows us to go in a completely different direction.
Looking Forward
AI is leading us into a new reality, which is way more playful. And the interesting part is AI is based on questions, not on answers. So AI can serve as our anti-code in the AI environment and future. So like I showed you in the very beginning with the LinkedIn example, even in one billion profiles, not a single pattern appeared.
So I think it’s our responsibility to learn how to ask questions again. And Melvity can help you on this. This is our chance. That was a great pleasure.
My name is Christian Wehner. One love, rock and roll, and goodbye. Thank you.
