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Leave it to 6-year-olds to reinvent a game that’s been around since the Chinese Han Dynasty: Rock Paper Scissors.
I was at my nephew’s youth soccer practice when the coach initiated a game of Rock Paper Scissors to see who would be up next to practice kicking to the goalie. Dynamite? Sword? Handgun? Lava? This isn’t the game I grew up playing! What happened to the rock, the paper, and the scissors? I asked the boys, who quickly informed me that the game had been updated. They delighted in teaching me the new rules. I was being mentored by 6-year-olds. And more than introduce me to a new game, they reminded me to:
When I was young, I never considered changing the game… but they did! (Move over Gen Zs, Gen Alpha is on your heels!) Where else are we missing novel approaches by playing with outdated rules? For example, when we assume that mentoring only occurs in a 1:1 relationship or that a mentor is always someone senior in age or career path, we are playing Rock Paper Scissors. One of our mentoring program leaders recently shared her struggle to recruit enough mentors for her incoming cohort of new nurses. After we decided to use group mentoring, she expressed distress over aligning the schedules for the participants in each group every month. I proposed, “We’re assuming that people must always be in the same group. What if we instead form new groups each month around whoever can participate that day? If the goal is to offer them a champion as they transition into practice, we could offer them a community of champions!” And with that shift in thinking, we added Dynamite Sword Lava to the game. (Kudos to our client Lisa who was willing to experiment!) The longer we play a game, the more entrenched we become in the rules of that game. But by engaging in mentoring conversations – with 6-year-olds or colleagues – we discover fresh perspectives and ideas and the permission to think differently. © 2023. Ann Tardy and MentorLead. www.mentorlead.com. All Rights Reserved. |