Signature idea
THE UNLIKELY FORMULA FOR ALMOST ANY PROBLEM
Your audience already brings valuable knowledge, skills and experience. Bas helps people explore what happens when they add fresh eyes and a small step into action.
Expertise
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Childlike Intelligence
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Curious Little Experiments
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Progress
Bas brings this idea to audiences facing serious organizational challenges. It gives people a way to look again, question what they assume and explore a useful next move.
The magic isn’t in any single ingredient. It’s in the combination.
THE STORY BEHIND THE FORMULA
HAVE WE BECOME TOO SMART TO SEE THE OBVIOUS?
Knowledge and experience help us recognize patterns and understand what matters. They also shape the questions we ask and the possibilities we consider.
Over time, familiar assumptions can start to feel like facts. Professional language makes a challenge harder to explain. Meetings get longer while the answers become more predictable.
Bas calls this Terminal Seriousness: becoming so caught up in complexity, rules and established ways of working that we lose the freedom to see differently.
A ten-year-old comes to the same question without all those professional filters. That fresh perspective is something adults can learn to use again.
WE DON’T ASK PROFESSIONALS TO BECOME CHILDISH. WE HELP THEM REDISCOVER THE POWER OF CHILDLIKE INTELLIGENCE.
A POWERFUL CHALLENGE TO KICKSTART THE FORMULA
COULD A TEN-YEAR-OLD UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU ARE TRYING TO SOLVE?
Before you look for another answer, try explaining the challenge in a world a child understands and cares about.
Who is affected? What is difficult for them? What would you like to be different?
Translating the question forces you to remove jargon and examine what you really mean. It reveals the parts you understand and the parts that still need work. The challenge stays serious; its core becomes easier to see.
In Bas’s sessions, that shift is a starting point for fresh thinking.
THE INGREDIENTS
THREE INGREDIENTS THAT MAKE THE FORMULA WORK
The magic isn’t in any single ingredient. It’s in the combination.
Expertise
The knowledge, skills and experience already present in your organization. It helps you understand the context, the constraints and what matters.
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Childlike Intelligence
The fresh perspective that questions assumptions, reveals new possibilities and brings energy. Through ConsultingKids’ work with 20,000+ children, Bas and his team noticed recurring patterns in how children approach complex challenges. Those patterns became practical lenses professionals can use themselves.
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Curious Little Experiments
Small steps that turn curiosity and wonder into action. Try an idea, notice what happens and use what you learn to choose your next step. The aim is to discover something, not to prove yourself right.
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Progress
Meaningful movement on the challenges that matter to your organization and the people it affects. That might start with a clearer question, a possibility worth exploring or something concrete you are ready to try.
The multiplication signs express the connection. Expertise makes fresh ideas relevant; fresh eyes give expertise new directions; small experiments create a way to learn from them.
THE MECHANISMS
MAKE CHILDLIKE INTELLIGENCE PRACTICAL
Through ConsultingKids, the organization founded by Bas, we’ve spent more than a decade working with over 20,000 children on some of the most complex organizational challenges. Studying how they think helped us identify four thinking mechanisms that help professionals rediscover their own Childlike Intelligence.
NO RULES
What if the rules weren’t the rules? Notice the invisible boundaries around your thinking. Which are necessary requirements, and which are assumptions nobody has questioned lately? Explore the freedom that remains around the real constraints
HAVE FUN
What makes people smile, engage and act? Play creates space to explore an idea before you need to defend it. Draw the problem, use an unexpected comparison or imagine a different version of the situation. Give yourself something new to evaluate.
DO GOOD
What simply feels like the right thing to do? Look at the challenge through the lives of the people affected by it. Ask whose interests are missing from the conversation and what would make things better for them.
NO SHAME
What if you went 10x without fear? Let a bold idea go further. Ask the question that feels too simple. Make room for unfinished thoughts and respond to other people’s contributions with curiosity.
LET’S BRING THE FORMULA TO LIFE FOR YOUR AUDIENCE.
What would you like your audience to think or do differently? Tell us what you’re planning, and let’s create an experience around your people, your challenges and what you want to move forward.
HEAR IT FROM PARTICIPANTS
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE FORMULA COMES TO LIFE?
What does combining expertise, Childlike Intelligence and Curious Little Experiments feel like in practice? Hear from participants after sessions at Digital Catapult and with professionals from Coutts and NatWest in London.
Press play for their perspectives on the experience.
LET’S EXPLORE
Tell us about your event, your audience and what you’d like them to take away. Leave your contact details below, and we’ll get back to you within two working days to explore an experience that fits.
Prefer to get in touch directly? Call +31 6 528 81 023 between 9:00 AM and 6:00 PM CET, or send us an email.
WANT TO TAKE IT ONE STEP FURTHER?
With ConsultingKids Projects, we don’t just teach professionals to think like a child. We go straight to the source of Childlike Intelligence and invite real children to tackle complex organizational challenges. We translate their unexpected thinking into fresh, relevant and actionable insights. A project typically takes around two to three months.
ConsultingKids Projects is one ingredient. Bas’s keynotes and workshops, Thinking Like a Child for Professionals, are another. And there’s more:
DisruptiveKids Challenger
Disrupt yourself before someone else does! Childlike Intelligence meets constructive rebellion.
The 100 Curious Little Experiments Program
Spark possibilities. Powered by curiosity and wonder. One small experiment at a time.
Want to know more about the other ingredients we can add to the mix?