Dealing with danger
Why you should learn interns to deal with danger, not avoid it.
The American philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead once (supposedly) said, "It is the business of the future to be dangerous."
Interesting thought; the future is dangerous.
If you look at it that way, the future is something to be charged at; it’s uncharted territory you’re entering.
It’s not something you approach with logic and “this is how we’ve always done it.”
That worked then, now you have to do it differently.
Invent new things.
Improvise.
Test.
Deal with danger.
In Tanzania, the Hadza, a tribe of hunter-gatherers, have been surviving with their own customs and practices for thousands of years.
In a study, members of the tribe (voluntarily!) were dropped into unknown terrain.
The goal was to see how they would move in a new situation.
Their movements didn’t follow a fixed pattern but zigzagged back and forth, sometimes covering long distances and sometimes short ones.
In some places, they stayed briefly, in others, they searched for food for longer periods.
This seemingly random and illogical pattern is not strange and certainly not without reason; it is a pattern known as the ‘survival pattern’ or Lévy flight (named after a French mathematician).
Evolutionarily, this phenomenon makes perfect sense: In an unknown environment, it’s not your sense of direction that determines your chances of survival, but your ability to adapt your route to the circumstances.
A straight line from A to B is a poor survival strategy.
The future is dangerous, even for interns.
This also applies to training young talent.
The job market is extremely tight, talent is scarce, and how you find people requires increasingly creative answers; it requires adaptability. Sticking to your path from A to B no longer works as it did in your familiar world of yesterday.
For students, it’s equally thrilling; the internship represents their first steps in a certain profession.
How you prepare the student for that is crucial in giving them a positive or negative experience.
If you teach the student to move as quickly as possible from A to B in a straight line, the chances are high it will fail; there will be mistakes, unexpected events, and setbacks.
Make sure you have adaptability in that exciting future and teach it to students as well.
Because the future may be scary, but your chances of survival as a company or organization increase, just like the chances of interns to thrive in the unknown, exciting environment of 'work.'