I'm loving how fun it is to try something new, find some success, then just start doing more of it.
I'm having this experience now. And it's all thanks to our family Christmas letter.Every year one of our kids takes authorship of the letter and each year we try to find some new and interesting way to use the lens of our children to make fun of ourselves.
Around the time I should have been "helping" Cooper with the letter writing, I started dabbling in flowchart software, mainly because I was trying to design a set of web applications and sites for my upcoming book.
Rather than try to learn the ins and outs of Creately with a real, useful project, I decided to cut my teeth by doing something more fun.
If you have kids, or you spend a lot of time with kids, you might recognize the process outlined below. Between innocence and adulthood, kids go through a fair amount of figuring out what works. Since parents are the gatekeepers between them and so much of what they want, much of figuring out what they want comes with figuring out their parents.
In particular, our children recognize that being caught doing something wrong, or something that they've been told to do differently could endanger their Future Entertainment Options (FEOs).
Now they're very careful when they find themselves in one of these spots. They haven't figured out how to get un-caught yet (though I'm sure they're working on it). In the meantime, they just work hard (I swear I can can see gears grinding in Devon's head) trying to figure out how to work us in those few critical seconds after the jig is up.
I developed a little flowchart resulting from observations of my kids decision process. I handed it to the boys for review. To my surprise not only could they read the boxes and arrows and follow the logic, on putting it down, they eyed me with a mixture of suspicion and concern that I might have figured out a little too much.
Christmas card list feedback from people over 48 inches was good enough that I was encouraged to spend more time with flow-charting, applying a similar approach to documenting steps one might take in developing an action plan for a social good program.As we put The Dragonfly Effect into its final draft form, we are considering putting in several flowcharts inspired by the one below to help readers get unstuck, or just get a less overwhelming perspective of the task ahead of them, and maybe even laugh.
Would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on that idea.
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