Vivvy handed me a fork.
She’s two. She saw her Papa looking for something in the drawer and wanted to help, so she grabbed the first thing her hand found and held it out to me. She had no idea what I needed. She just wanted to be useful.
I smiled and explained that I needed a spoon, not a fork. I was making coffee.
“But whyyyyy.”
Because you stir coffee with a spoon, Vivvy. That’s just how it works.
“But whyyyyy,” she asked again.
And, so, I explained again, this time with more conviction, the way you do when you can feel an argument slipping and you’re not ready to admit it. I was genuinely defending my position. To a two-year-old, who was sitting on the counter she’s not allowed to sit on, wearing yesterday’s pajamas, holding a fork she pulled out of a drawer that had been picked completely over by four grandkids who stayed with us that weekend. Not a spoon in sight.
She just kept asking, “Why?” Every explanation I gave her produced the exact same response. Why? Why? Why?
Eventually, I ran out of answers. I took the fork, stirred my coffee, and drank it.
It worked perfectly. There was never a single reason it wouldn’t.
Vivvy moved on immediately. She didn’t celebrate. She didn’t even seem to notice. She was already on to the next thing before I put the fork down, completely unaware that she had just won.
I stood at that counter a little longer than I needed to, thinking about what had just happened. Not about the fork, but about what it took to get me to use it. She didn’t come in with a solution; she just grabbed the first thing she could reach. She didn’t know there was a problem. And, somehow, she dismantled every argument I had without ever making one of her own.
That same thing happens at work all the time. Someone newer—someone without all the history—hands you something that doesn’t look like what you asked for. Meanwhile, the easiest thing in the world to do is to send it back, explain that we’ve always done it this way, and that’s not how it works here. I need a spoon, not a fork.
The “That’s how we’ve always done it” instinct doesn’t feel like stubbornness from the inside. That’s what makes it so hard to catch. It feels like experience. It feels like knowing what works. You reach for the familiar thing without thinking because you always have, it always worked, and nobody ever questioned it.
Until a two-year-old hands you a fork.
The most dangerous blind spots in any organization aren’t complicated. They aren’t buried in data or hidden in some process document nobody reads. They’re sitting right out in the open, obvious to anyone who hasn’t yet learned to stop seeing them. It usually takes someone without the history, without all the reasons something won’t work, to reach into the drawer and hand you something you never would have picked up yourself.
The next time someone on your team hands you something that isn’t the shape you were looking for, stop before you send it back. Ask yourself whether you actually have a reason it won’t work, or whether you’re just standing at the counter looking for a spoon that isn’t there.
Vivvy is going to hand me things I don’t expect for the rest of my life. I used to think that was one of the beautiful, exhausting parts of being a Papa. Now I think I should be paying closer attention.
She didn’t even know she won. But she did.