The Power of Pretend
The Blackberry started with a prototype that would make most engineers cringe: a wooden block. The engineering team handed this chunk of wood to their CEO, and he carried it around as if it were an actual phone, holding it to his ear during meetings and slipping it into his pocket between calls.
Though he caught strange glimpses from passersby, he was able to feel the idea. The weight, the size, the way it sat in his hand—all of this informed what would become one of the most revolutionary devices of its time.
This story came back to me when I read the IDEO article about a man whose life ambition was to take children's crazy ideas and make them happen.
https://www.ideo.com/journal/meet-the-inventor-who-helps-bring-kids-wildest-ideas-to-life
What strikes me about both stories is the willingness to look foolish in the service of something bigger. The BlackBerry CEO was walking around with a block of wood. The IDEO inventor is seriously considering a kid's sketch of a flying bicycle. Here was someone else who understood that the most breakthrough innovations often start with what looks like elaborate make-believe.
An example of throwing caution to the wind, displaying an acute awareness of the suspicion you're sure to attract, and—maybe most importantly—examples of the pure joy of taking a young person’s idea of something cool, or great, or even just functional...and literally making it so.
There's something deeply human about this process. We all started as kids with wild ideas, drawing impossible machines and dreaming up solutions to problems that didn't even exist yet. Most of us learned to temper those impulses, to be "realistic," to consider the constraints before the possibilities.
But what if we didn't? What if we kept that childlike willingness to prototype with blocks of wood, to carry around our half-baked ideas like they were already real?
The most innovative companies understand this. They create spaces where adults can play pretend again, where a cardboard mockup is treated with the same seriousness as a final product, where the question isn't "Will this work?" but "What if it did?"
Because sometimes the best way to build the future is to pretend it already exists—and then catch up with your own imagination.