By Marc Cinanni
You’re in a restaurant. There’s a baby two tables away who won’t stop staring at you. For five full minutes he peers into you with the intensity of a cheetah. You blink and look away first.
In somebody’s kitchen, a baby is sitting in a high chair eating a bowl of soup. Between spoonfuls, she flips the bowl over to watch the mix of broth and noodles slowly leak down her leg, then the chair, then onto the floor.
These incidents aren’t problems to be solved. They’re dispatches from the fastest learners on the planet. Little scientists, negotiators, and explorers we stopped watching the moment we thought we knew better.
Today’s global leadership development industry generates over $60 billion a year to teach fortysomethings how to think differently, yet the world’s fastest learners are all under the age of five. A baby’s brain forms one million new neural connections per second in the first few years of life. While a successful leadership retreat will produce a handful of LinkedIn posts and a colorful PDF.
Management programs spend enormous amounts of time trying to revive qualities such as presence, curiosity, fearlessness, and the ability to fail without hanging onto ego. All things that were present in any team member before they turned six. Then school happened, work happened, and here we are.
What follows are five management minds you’ve never considered. They’re small. Their ideas are not. None of them have bestsellers, they don’t do TED talks, and they can’t tie their shoes. But if you pay attention the way they pay attention, you’ll find they have more to teach us than anyone who ever made you sit in a circle.
1. The Presence Mind
Specialty: The only person in the room who’s actually in it
Babies can’t be anywhere except where they’ve been plopped. They have no “elsewhere,” no open tabs, no thoughts about a conversation they’ll have on Tuesday. The person in front of them has their full attention because absorption is their default.
This is a mental baseline we spend our entire adult lives trying to recover. With apps, coaches, breathing techniques, and expensive retreats in expensive places. All things that are designed to make us briefly feel the way a toddler feels all the time. Or in simpler terms: to return us to the state of attention we were born with.
The Presence Mind is not paying attention because they’ve been told to. They’re paying attention because the world is astonishing and beautiful and heart-opening and they haven’t yet developed the mental mechanism to be somewhere else while appearing to be with you.
When did you last make someone feel like they were the whole world?
2. The Curiosity Mind
Specialty: Asking the question underneath the question, underneath the question, underneath the question
Curiosity is a childhood trait that gets systematically trained out of us. By the time people reach positions of seniority, they’ve spent decades in places that reward certainty while looking down on not-knowing. So here’s what happens: organizations are full of people who are very good at projecting confidence while being terrified of questions they don’t have answers to.
Preschoolers ask about 75 questions per hour in the company of an adult. Once they’ve had their coffee, a senior executive will perhaps ask two or three. Because the curiosity mind hasn’t learned yet that questions can signal weakness. Or that you’re supposed to already have an answer before you open your mouth.
Most of the Curiosity Mind’s questions are why questions. Not where, not what, not how: why. As in, Why do you have lines on your face? Why do we need to leave? Why did that man look sad? Why didn’t we talk to him? Why do you look at the computer so much? For them it’s not data, it’s about something boardrooms never really do: asking “why” until something honest comes out.
When did you last ask why, and then ask why again?
3. The Play Mind
Specialty: The serious business of play
The Play Mind doesn’t approach hard things with skepticism. They approach them by playing. They pick things up, turn them over, or place them next to something else to see what happens. Play is not how they avoid difficulty, it’s how they get close enough to explore.
Research on play in organizational settings—from Lego’s study of Serious Play and productivity to academic work on what happens when improvisation enters the corporate environment—consistently finds the same thing. That play doesn’t make work less serious, it makes serious work possible. It’s the difference between the organizations that discover and the ones that just optimize.
The Play Mind plays because the world is interesting and they want to interact with it and know it better. And they haven’t yet learned the distinction between work and play, because for them that distinction doesn’t exist.
When did you last try something you couldn’t justify in advance?
4. The Innovation Mind
Specialty: Experimenting without ego
The Innovation Mind runs hundreds of experiments per day. Squish an ant. Put a shoe in their mouth. Drop something off a table, watch it fall, and drop it again. What seems like chaos is actually a kind of curriculum. They’re building their understanding of the world from scratch by running one small experiment at a time.
But here’s what they don’t do: hold post-mortems, debriefs, or defend a hypothesis that didn’t work out. Or feel that the result of a failed experiment reflects on their worth as a person. They just learn.
In computer science there’s a well-known distinction between “explore” and “exploit.” In exploit mode, you have a goal, a set of competencies, and you’re trying to get something done. In explore mode there’s no goal. Instead, you’re finding out what’s out there and that’s it. Babies are in explore mode all the time because they have nothing invested in the result. Everything’s invested in understanding because there’s nothing to prove (but everything to know).
There’s a point where organizations stop doing this well. On comes the pressure to exploit (deliver, justify, show returns) which crowds out the space for free exploration. The outcome is something that feels like “theatrical innovation” where activities carry the gestures of experimentation without the actual desire to know what’s really going to happen.
We seem to call this sort of thing “user research.” The Innovation Mind calls it “Wednesday morning in the living room.”
What would you attempt if the result said nothing about your worth?
5. The Imagination Mind
Specialty: Not yet knowing what impossible means
There’s a specific age at which the concept of impossible enters a child’s worldview. It arrives at a certain developmental stage, the point where the brain has built enough of a model of the world to start drawing firm conclusions about what it can and cannot contain.
Before that point, the only limits are physical. Impossible hasn’t been invented yet. Fantasy and reality are the same, and they’re available for the same purposes. A cardboard box is a spaceship. A stick is a sword. The living room floor is lava. The Imagination Mind is not pretending, they’re working with the most powerful design tool available to any human brain, and they haven’t yet been told that serious people are not supposed to use it.
Imagination and fantasy are how children process overwhelming complexity and how they metabolize a world that is genuinely too large and too strange to absorb all at once.
When you look at the world through their eyes, something changes. You start to see what isn’t there yet and what could be. Because babies are never told their ideas are unrealistic. That comes much later.
What did you stop trying to do when you learned what impossible meant?
These minds are already in your building
The five minds described above aren’t rare or inaccessible. The people who know them best are already in your company.
They’re called parents.
And the time they spend with their babies while on parental leave should not be considered time away from the office. It’s one of the most intensive periods of human growth that most people will ever undertake. Yet, companies have been systematically failing to recognize that.
Because early parenting means managing under conditions of genuine uncertainty. It’s prioritizing with little sleep when the stakes are real and information is hard to access. It’s staying present for someone who needs you fully, when you didn’t know you had anything left, and then you find it.
In 2017 (remarkably recently) neuroscientist Susana Carmona and her colleagues published the first major study of what pregnancy does to the human brain. The finding: the maternal brain becomes more neurologically plastic during pregnancy than at any point since infancy. More adaptive than adolescence, the brain is reorganizing itself for a new kind of learning and a new quality of attention.
Meanwhile, as Lee Gettler’s research has shown, fathers who are present and hands-on in early childcare experience measurable hormonal shifts that make them more patient and more empathetic—two of the most consistently cited qualities of effective leadership. This is biology, not just cute ideas.
No business school has replicated these conditions. A parent on leave is not in the office, but they are learning every day. Under pressure in a way no training has yet found a way to teach. Then the parent returns to find their old job waiting, with everything exactly as they left it. Nobody ever asks what they’ve learned.
This is one of the greatest missed opportunities in organizational life.
Now we’re living through a moment in which the questions of what makes us human are urgent. Machines can do more of what we thought made us valuable. What remains (what cannot be automated, optimized, or offloaded) is exactly what our five minds have been demonstrating: presence, play, innovation, and imagination.
In the age of AI, these are not soft skills. They’re the only skills that matter going forward. And the people who’ve been practicing them most recently, most intensively, and under the most demanding conditions you can imagine, could be sitting right across from you.
You just haven’t thought to ask.
***
This piece was developed in partnership with the Van Leer Foundation, an independent organization working globally to ensure every child gets the best possible start in life. Their journal Early Childhood Matters explores the science and stories of early childhood development. Read it at earlychildhoodmatters.online.
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Community Updates
To celebrate the German translation of Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, the widely acclaimed new book by Agnes Callard, Atlas Publishing Lab is bringing its Başka Felsefe (“Another Philosophy”) series to Berlin for a special event. On Sunday, June 14, 4-6 pm, Agnes and Berislav Marušić will discuss “What Is a Good Life?” at Reethaus. A few tickets remain.
On June 16-17, the School of Founders at IESE Business School invites 300 founders of scaleups from 50+ nationalities to the Founders Forum—a two-day gathering in Barcelona that goes deeper than most startup conferences and looks at the founder’s journey through the lens of presence, personal transformation, and co-creation. We are delighted to contribute with live music by Mark Aanderud and a keynote by our co-founder Tim Leberecht.
Co-organized by our friends at the World Human Forum and set in the cradle of philosophy, next to Aristotle’s ancient Lyceum in Athens, The Lyceum Project is an annual multidisciplinary initiative where philosophy meets AI. This year’s gathering is devoted to the nexus of “animate, ancestral, and artificial intelligence,” and will take place on June 19-20. Get your free pass here.
ResonantOS, co-founded by Ximo Peris and currently in early testing phase, is an DAO alternative to the dominance of big tech AI platforms. Think of it as a decentralized operating ecosystem designed for advanced collaboration between humans and AI. It is built on the principle of the Augmented Mind, ensuring that as AI evolves, individual human agency, data sovereignty, and collective intelligence evolve right alongside it, rather than being sidelined.
Supported by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, the Acosta Institute’s Healing-Centered Education initiative has engaged leaders and educators across conferences, certificate programs, fellowships, retreats, and public storytelling projects. A newly released impact report captures the scale and spirit of what emerged through this nearly one-million-dollar investment.
Thanks Michael! Thank you for sharing. We were wondering ~ what about the empathetic mind? The mind that ensures that a stern look or angry reaction triggers an immediate response of wanting to find reconciliation, or that immediately gives a hug after friction as a way to find reconnect?