How Tom and Jerry helped me accelerate the change I had set out to make as a founder
The year was 2012 and I was running my first education startup - An experiential STEM venture for kids.
When children aged 8 to 12 wanted to learn science, they had to listen to teachers in the classroom and cram from school text books. This was unacceptable to me because the teaching learning process was very passive and children didn’t seem interested in learning the subject. I envisioned a world where children could have more fun, and be more engaged and inspired while learning science. I brought this world about by conceptualizing 90 min workshops where children used everyday objects to build a working prototype that they could share with the world and be proud of. This vision meant a lot to me as the rote method of education had made a minimal impact on my skills and interests as a working professional.
The characteristics of a good vision
It is centred on the problem you want to solve.
It is a tangible end state you can visualise.
It is meaningful to you and the people you intend to impact.
However as we started scaling, the big challenge I faced was to convince a team of mentors to join and stick with me in making this vision a reality. While I made JDs in word docs to describe the company and the different roles I was hiring for, not many people seemed to understand or be convinced about the problem I was trying to solve. People would enquire about the company and the role, but would not end up joining.
This changed one day when I invited one of our prospective hires (a young engineer named Kedar) to join me in a workshop on simple machines for grade 5 kids in a nearby school.
First, I asked Kedar to go in and observe a regular class (grade 5 B) that was underway. Kids were seated in chairs with one half asleep and the other half dreaming out of the window. The teacher droned on with a textbook in one hand and chalk in the other, while drawing out the 6 different machines on the board.
After 20 mins, I then asked Kedar to help me with the same class on simple machines next door (grade 5 C). In this session we used Tom & Jerry to capture children’s attention and imagination. We introduced them to the different machines via a Rube Goldberg contraption (the one Tom uses so frequently and unsuccessfully to catch Jerry). The kids then broke off into groups, and used pipes, wooden blocks, marbles, rulers, pins and cars, to create their own contraptions. The marble rolled down the pipe hitting the first wooden block to create a domino effect, leading to the unwinding of a toy car, which moved as a weight over a ruler, forcing a lever with a pin at one end to move upward and pop a balloon. It was like magic!
We had just manufactured a ‘visionary moment’ together. Kedar observed the problem first hand by seeing children struggling with the status quo, and then experienced and contributed to the solution, making the children’s lives better.
The next day, he walked into my office rejecting an offer from an MNC to become the first person to join me in making experiential learning a reality. From that day on, we perfected and packaged the Tom and Jerry Rube Goldberg workshop to not just inspire and hire our entire team of 50 mentors, but also scale experiential learning to over 25,000 kids across schools in India. Every time we felt unsure about our direction or decisions at work, or had to convince somebody about our vision - we went back to Tom and Jerry.
Creating a visionary moment
Whose world are you trying to change?
What does their world look like today?
Why is that status quo world unacceptable?
When will you know that you’ve achieved your vision?
How will you bring about this change?
In a world filled with so much flux, everyone from investors to customers to employees, are continuously looking for validation, meaning and a purpose that’s larger than themselves. As a founder, your vision has to align you and your team on the change you want to bring to the world. Internalizing that vision across your team requires developing a deep sense of responsibility for the change you’re creating, and you need every person to experience the status quo you want to change. Intentionally crafting and drip feeding small but powerful visionary moments can go a long way in creating a buy-in and accelerating the change you set out to make as a founder.
