Ella's Kitchen Founder On Why Thinking Like A Toddler Holds The Key To Success

Paul Lindley & Mary Gordon discuss Lindley's new book on why toddlers hold the key to unlocking our potential as adults.


What do toddlers have to do with business? Paul Lindley, British entrepreneur and founder of the organic baby and children’s food company Ella’s Kitchen, has some ideas. A lot of them in fact – and they form the basis of his new book Little Wins: The Huge Power of Thinking Like a Toddler. He shares them here with Ashoka entrepreneur Mary Gordon, Founder and President of the international organization Roots of Empathy.

Mary Gordon: Paul, you’re a father, a successful entrepreneur, and you were, like the rest of us, once a toddler. How do toddlers and business come together in your thinking and experience?

Paul Lindley: What I’ve learned from 11 years of growing Ella's Kitchen is that business is about people, not money. You've got to engage people by saying, ‘This is our mission, our purpose in life.’ In our case, it's about improving children’s lives and helping them develop healthier relationships with food.

And yes, we all were once toddlers. But when I talk about the toddler skill set, it tends to be seen as irrelevant to adults and therefore to business. Toddlers aren’t flawed, trainee adults; their curiosity, determination, creativity and ambition should be the envy of the professional world. We should rediscover some of the ways we thought when we were toddlers. If we did, we would have a better, more inclusive, holistic view of society.

For example, toddlers are often seen as self-centered, but as you know well and have helped us all to see, they're highly empathetic. When we grow older, we put blinkers on. Part of the book is about showing your feelings with family, friends, colleagues. Otherwise we get miscommunication, we're less productive, we make less money and do less good.

Gordon: If we think about little toddlers, what motivates them, and how we can best reward them, the research tells us that intrinsic motivation is where they come from – and when we reward them and interfere with their natural inclination to do something, we rob them and make it false. In the business community and corporate life, we traditionally motivate through money and power. What are your thoughts on that?

Lindley: We want our children to develop the natural skills that we all had as toddlers, including empathy, communication, teamwork — and these are skills that employers need.

My view of employing people is: Will this person fit into our company and believe in our mission? Will they stand out, be able to make mistakes, offer alternative solutions, put a hand up and say, 'I don’t understand why this meeting is happening at 9 o’clock on a Monday morning'? Toddlers don't know the rules and they are happy to experiment. It doesn't matter that they fail. They're willing to give it a go.

We've got to experiment with different ways to educate. It’s massively rewarding when people get an opportunity to come together, share ideas, and be in an environment where failure is accepted. I’m reminded of Sir Ken Robinson, speaker in the famous TED talk 'Do Schools Kill Creativity?' Sir Ken highlights in a report that 98% of 3- to 5-year-olds regularly think in divergent ways, which is a sign of creativity. That dramatically reduces over time. By our mid-20s, only 2% of us are using divergent thinking in our daily lives.

Gordon: It's as if you're taking the principles of being a happy toddler into the workplace, not in a patronizing way, but encouraging people to have courage and connect. We don't typically see the workplace as a safe learning environment. What you're talking about is how to collectively leave a legacy. What do you feel your personal legacy might be?

Lindley: I'm on a journey to try to help people live their lives in a different way.

When I set out to launch Ella’s Kitchen, I wanted to leave a legacy along the lines of: ‘he created this company that caused a change in children’s lives and improved their behaviors around food and their relationship with food.’ I've tried to do the same around hygiene and access to clean water with Paddy’s Bathroom, my second business.

With Little Wins, I’ve expanded my focus. We live in a world where there is more stress than ever before. A statistic that took me by surprise during my research: we are exposed to more information in a single day than our 16th century ancestors were during their entire lives. Now, that's not to say that we absorb all this information and process it every day – but we've created this highly complex world that we're not evolved to deal with.

Everything in society is designed for the short term. Children are pressured to pass a constant stream of academic exams covering an increasingly smaller number of subjects, right from the age of about 10 years old. Companies are designed to increase shareholder profit dividends each and every year and decisions are influenced by the beat of the ‘quarterly reporting’ drum. Politicians are overly influenced in proposing policy by their need to get re-elected every four or so years. In summary, all of our major institutions, and our society’s eco system itself, are short term focused. Yet everything we value in life — our children's future, the environment, pensions, national security — is long-term.

The legacy I'd like to leave with Little Wins is a roadmap to simplifying our lives, an encouragement to recapture the playfulness and resilience that every one of us had when we were toddlers and to give adults the permission to be self-confident, free thinking and imaginative.

Gordon: You've addressed the universality of toddlerhood, whether you're in Timbuktu or Toronto, and what can happen to interrupt that natural, beautiful learning highway. If we have policies that allow toddlers to have a humanizing and emphatic early development stage, we will be in a very different position in the future. Paul, you set the table for the toddlers, and you set the table for businesses to change the world.

Ashoka Ashoka Contributor

