The Gardener and The Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children by Alison Gopnik
This week’s book brief veers away from the usual non-fiction business books, and instead focuses on child development. But even so, it has ideas that can be applied in the SaaS/Customer Success space. After all, there are parallels with the stages of toddler to adolescent to adult that organizations go through and that we go through in our careers. The Gardener and The Carpenter was recommended during one of the sessions at the 2021 Behavioral Science in Policy and Application Conference – I’ll have more to share on the conference highlights soon!
My Key Takeaways from the book:
Broad Attention vs Focused Attention:
As humans evolved, there were advantages to people paying attention to everything (in hunter/gatherer societies). Now, it has shifted and people who focus their attention have an advantage in schooling
Exploration vs Exploitation:
The process of growing up allows for a protected space for exploration; then in adulthood people do less exploration and instead focus on exploitation of the skills they have acquired
Safe space for learning:
You are vulnerable while you are learning; that’s why we need parents to provide a stable, caring environment in which to explore
Prescriptive expectations:
There is no point in being prescriptive about how children turn out – we don’t know the future and they need to evolve
Types of play develop different skills:
Rough and tumble play helps us learn to interact with others
Exploratory play helps us learn how things work
Pretend play helps us think about possibilities and understand other people’s minds
Reward and control systems
In adolescence the reward systems in the brain are turned up; which means adolescents seek rewards with fewer thoughts to the risks; this should be combined with an increase in control systems from practicing adult jobs but increasingly it is not – we don’t provide enough apprenticeship type learning for adolescents so they lack opportunities to develop control systems
Individual vs shared responsibility
Increasingly our society is designed around individuals – benefits and systems are designed for individuals ideally who contribute to society through the work they do; but children do not yet contribute and need to be a shared responsibility for a healthy functioning society. When we expect an individual alone to care for their own children, and set up systems that way, we run into problems and children suffer.
My ideas of how to use the concepts from this book in SaaS
While building a startup, you need to balance broad attention with focused attention in order to broadly understand your market and while still focusing on your niche/product fit
You’re vulnerable while you’re learning so think about how this applies to the early investors you bring in
How are you thinking about how your organization plays in different ways? Do employees have space for exploratory play to learn how things work and build better? Is there space to think about possibilities and understand the buyer’s mind?
Are your expectations too prescriptive? Are you allowing the company to evolve to adapt for the unknown future or focusing solely on what’s worked in the past?
My ideas of how to use the concepts from this book in Customer Success
Are you thinking about your product in a focused or broad way? Keeping in mind both kinds of attention management can help you stay abreast of trends in the industry that may affect your product and your career path specifically.
If you’re new to customer success, does your organization provide space for exploration as you gain skills in customer success? Are you allowing yourself time to explore and build your skill set outside of work too?
If you think about your career skill building as play – how are you finding opportunities to learn to interact with others in the CS context? How are you finding opportunities for learning how things work in exploratory play? Are you thinking about possibilities that could be, with your career? Thinking about your career building as play may help to take some of the pressure off and you may find surprising sources of inspiration and learning
Growing up as a person has parallels with growing up as an organization and within your career. I hope you found some useful insight by thinking both broadly and in a focused way, about my insights on the key takeaways and thoughts I’ve shared on the book.
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