Iggle Piggle
“Don’t worry Iggle Piggle! It’s only a Tiddle!” says (Sir) Derek Jacobi from my television set. My wife and I are watching our nightly episode of the fantastic In The Night Garden with out 20 month-old. Iggle Piggle (pictured) has just discovered a stream of water fountaining out of the ground.
It’s a new experience. Like many of us when confronted with something new, he’s a little overwhelmed by it. He’s never experienced it before, and it doesn’t fit with anything he knows of the world already.
Then slowly he gains a little courage. He puts his foot over the fountain to see what happens. The stream stops. The new experience, once overwhelming, is now something he can control.
But then suddenly, this new experience he understands turns out to be something else alltogether! Once he puts his foot over the stream, another one starts just a little way away. Maybe he doesn’t understand everything after all.
Lesson One: For Leaders
As managers and leaders, people are our job. And they’re notoriously hard to understand. Once you think you’ve worked someone out, and dealt with a situation, some other behaviour crops up. Maybe turning up late to work has turned into extended lunch breaks, or more blatant absenteeism?
So Iggle Piggle stamps his foot Stomp! Stomp! Stomp! And the ‘Tiddle’ stops.
Suddenly he has discovered something important: just stopping the behavior (the stream of water) doesn’t solve the problem as it will just crop up somewhere else. But, in Iggle Piggle’s case quite by accident, there is a more general solution available. Three stomps to stop, three stomps to start.
It seems totally unrelated to the stream of water, but it works. Repeatedly. And it’s fun. While it isn’t the solution to every management problem, I believe that fostering good relationships with our direct reports comes a long way. If you don’t already do them, take a look at my post on One-on-Ones. And if that doesn’t work, try stamping your foot three times.
Lesson Two: For Entrepreneurs
So Iggle Piggle has this new-found knowledge. And it’s fun. Stamp three times and the stream starts. Stamp again and it stops. Fun — though a little pointless.
But Iggle Piggle has friends and Makka Pakka is one of them. He’s the guy whose role on the show is to wash the other character’s faces and he’s rather enchanted by rocks. Weird, I know, but that’s the Night Garden for you.
Iggle Piggle goes to visit Makka Pakka to show off his new fun trick. Stamp three times and the stream starts. Stamp again and it stops. Fun — though a little pointless.
Makka Pakka thinks this is a great lark and joins in. Tiddle On! Tiddle Off!
But here’s where there’s something we can learn from Children’s Television: What is pointless fun for Iggle Piggle has a real-world application for Makka Pakka. Makka Pakka takes his face-washing sponge, stamps three times, gets a stream of watter and rinses out his sponge. There’s no need to go wherever he normally goes to clean the sponge: he can do it right here!
Many of the successful businesses around us are the result of someone doing something for fun and someone else turning it into a business. Sending text messages is fun, but sharing 140 character messages on Twitter is a business. Turning CDs into MP3s for your friends is fun, but iTunes is a business.
Lesson Three: For Educators
I’ll keep this one short because there’s no more story, just a different insight (and probably the insight the writers expect us to take from the show).
Iggle Piggle discovered something. He learned something about that discovery. He didn’t tell Makka Pakka what he’d learned, instead he showed him what he’d discovered and what he’d learned about that discovery. Makka Pakka was then able to easily copy the behaviour and learn the lesson. He learned quickly because he was doing the behaviour rather than hearing about it. Because of this quick turn around, he immediately saw the practical implication of the lesson he’d learned.
We learn faster from what we do than what we hear. And when we expend less energy on the learning process, we have more energy (brain-space) available for applying what we’ve learned.
In the words of Derek Jacobi, “Isn’t that a pip?”
