Two adults played Scrabble with a five year old who is just learning to read.

What we learned:

1. Virtually any situation can be turned into a learning opportunity, but you have to be flexible.
2. Our own expertise can get in the way of approaching a problem, interaction, or problem.
3. When a person is faced with a challenge that is too much of a stretch, that person’s brain doesn’t even try.
4. If you want that person to engage, the challenge has to be simplified, for example the rules and goals might to be modified based on the knowledge and skills of the person being challenged.
5. A novice facing a challenge will often embark on random actions, which means they are unlikely to succeed.
6. If we want that person to succeed, we need  some mechanism to reduce the number of possibilities for them.
7. To engage with another person (advising, coaching, teaching), one needs perceive how the information is received, and then make adjustments based on their reactions, their engagement, confidence, and commitment.

This is very different from the way we often approach giving advice or teaching, but it’s the way exemplary leaders and teachers interact, and it’s learnable.

Here is how our experience played out.

The five year old saw we’d played Scrabble often and wanted to play.

A five year old who struggles with spelling three letter words can’t play Scrabble. We could have just told him that and moved on. The Einstellung Effect is where a person is so conditioned to a specific way of solving a problem that they fail to see other methods.

Rather than be blinded by what we always did and already know, we adjusted. We adopted a beginner’s mind (or shoshin in Buddhism): This was not just a Scrabble game, there were the materials of a Scrabble game that could be rearchitected into a different activity.

We all know that there are a lot of reasons to value expertise and experts. Expertise, though, comes with its own baggage.

Our prior knowledge initially got in the way. We know how to play Scrabble, we have a wide vocabulary, we knew how to form words. How often does what we already know prevent us from even considering what else we could see or do?

To entertain a five year old, we had to disregard all of our Scrabble knowledge and approach the activity with a beginner’s mindset.

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”

This is the opening the book “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice.” But Shunryu Suzuki.

The expert’s mind sees a fully developed method or system, such as a Scrabble game.

The beginner’s mind sees letter tiles that could be made into challenges appropriate for a five year old.

Our first attempt was to scale back the game. We started playing with each of us drawing our seven tiles. Think about all the expert mind things we already know.

1. We know that we need to create a word from our tiles.
2. We know a lot of words and how to spell them.
3. We know that the first word has to include the central starred square.
4. We know the we score based on the value of each letter, and the first word counts double.
5. Our strategy might be to look at our letters and mentally or physically rearrange them to form words.

The five year old knew none of that. He just stared.

Using our existing knowledge put us at a disadvantage; we were trying to engage a complete novice. In our case, we reframed from, “how do we play Scrabble with a five year old?” to “what would be a fun activity with letter tiles and a board that a five year old would enjoy?”

How could you apply that to situations or challenges that you face?

We constructed a game play mode for tiles and board that might interest a five year old.

1. Pool all the letters
2. Take turns creating words
3. No word counts for anyone unless it’s a word the five year old can read
4. No points, just congratulations for forming words

That still didn’t engage.

While we adults have a strategy for arranging the letter tiles into words, the five year old did not have a workable strategy. He started with random actions that wouldn’t succeed such as saying some word and then seeing if he could a) figure out how to spell the word, and then b) find those letters. Then try another word and repeat until he had a word that he could spell with the letters.

That strategy was not going to work.

This touched on that fifth point: where there are too many possibilities and only a brute force way to go through them one by one, the beginner is likely to be overwhelmed and no good solution will emerge.

We may face this whenever we teach a complex lesson or even when we offer advice to someone who doesn’t have a mental map to carry it out.

How did we simplify? We set out (mostly) letters that could be spelled into words he already knew and arranged a group of starter letters, suggesting he start words with those.

1. “Do you think you could spell cat or crab with these letters?”
2. “Here is a D. What words do you know that start with a D sound?”
3. “Can you take these three letters and arrange them into a word?”

While we initially made the letter pool too difficult, we were able to simplify it so he could succeed, and then make it a little harder later on.

By gauging interest (did his demeanor indicate he was problem solving or was he distracted), confidence (did he seem like he knew what he was doing or did he appear lost), and timing (had it been a while since he’d tried anything and should we suggest something else) we managed to hold his interest for over a half hour of spelling excursions, about five turns each where he spelled his own words and placed them on the board and deciphered ours.

We all had fun, and when it was over, we just moved on to the next activity instead of forcing a continuation to the official end of the game.

We’d taken  a situation that our expert’s mindset would have made intolerable, saw it with fresh eyes, adjusted based on observing the learner, and made it fun.

That seemed to be a win.