What Children Know About Teamwork That Adults Have Forgotten | Propel 360 Kenya | Jacton Ambalwa | July 21 2026 | Team Dynamics

 

Watch children play.

Not organized play. Not the kind with a referee and a scoreboard and an adult standing at the edge of the field explaining the rules. The other kind. The spontaneous, unstructured, nobody-planned-this kind that happens when a group of children are given space and time and left to figure it out themselves.

Nobody assigns roles.

Nobody drafts a terms of reference or a responsibility matrix or a communication protocol. Nobody calls a planning meeting before the game begins. And yet — somehow, within minutes, sometimes seconds — something organized emerges. Somebody leads. Somebody follows. Somebody spots the problem nobody else noticed and fixes it without being asked. Somebody encourages the one who is struggling.

The castle gets built.

The game gets played.

And when it ends, nobody scheduled a debrief.

What Happened Between Then and Now

Every adult in every organization was once that child.

Every senior manager who struggles to delegate was once a child who shared naturally, without instruction, because sharing was simply what the game required. Every executive who finds it difficult to ask for help was once a child who called out without embarrassment when they needed a hand, because needing a hand was not yet something to be ashamed of.

Every team that now requires a structured agenda to have a productive conversation was once a group of children who coordinated complex, creative, cooperative activity with nothing but instinct and the genuine desire to play together.

Something happened between then and now.

And it wasn't growth. Not entirely. Something was also lost — quietly, gradually, in the long process of becoming professional, becoming managed, becoming the kind of person who belongs in an organization.

The question worth asking is: what exactly was it?

The Instincts We Educated Away

Children collaborate the way they do because they haven't yet learned the things that make adult collaboration difficult.

They haven't learned that asking a question might make them look incompetent. They haven't learned that admitting they don't know something could be used against them. They haven't learned to protect their ideas until the right moment, or to wait for permission before acting, or to defer to hierarchy even when hierarchy is clearly wrong.

They haven't learned to perform competence instead of practicing it.

And so they try things. Freely, repeatedly, without the weight of reputation attached to the outcome. They fail at things and try differently and fail again and find a way that works — not because they are more talented than the adults who succeed them, but because the environment they are operating in has not yet taught them to be afraid of the attempt.

Fear is not something children bring to collaboration.

It is something organizations teach.

What We See in Schools

At Propel 360, one of the things we care about most deeply is what happens to young people before the workplace gets to them.

Our Students' Support Program exists because we believe that the habits of collaboration, the instincts of connection, the courage to speak and contribute and ask for help — these are not things that can be easily installed in a thirty-five-year-old who has spent fifteen years learning to operate differently.

They are things that need to be nurtured early. Protected. Practiced in environments where the cost of getting it wrong is low and the reward of genuine connection is immediate and real.

When we work with young people, we are not teaching them skills they don't have.

We are protecting the ones they already do.

We are creating spaces where the natural instincts of collaboration — the openness, the trust, the willingness to try and fail and try again together — are affirmed rather than educated away. Where the child who asks too many questions is not made to feel that asking is a problem. Where the one with the unconventional idea is given room to share it before the room decides whether it is useful.

Because the organizations of tomorrow will be built by the young people sitting in those rooms today.

And the kind of organizations they build will depend enormously on what those rooms taught them about what collaboration is supposed to feel like.

The Adult Unlearning

Here is the uncomfortable truth that sits at the center of this.

Most of what makes adult collaboration difficult is not a deficit. It is an acquisition.

We acquired the caution. We acquired the self-protection. We acquired the careful management of how we appear, and what we share, and when we speak, and how much of ourselves we bring into a professional space.

We learned it, which means — in theory — it can be unlearned.

Not completely. Not quickly. But enough.

Enough for a team to sit together and, for a moment, drop the professional armor. To say the thing they actually think instead of the thing that is safe to say. To try the idea that might not work instead of the one that definitely won't embarrass anyone. To ask for help without it meaning something about their adequacy.

To play, essentially. In the way that adults play when the environment finally gives them permission.

We have watched this happen. In boardrooms and community halls and open fields across Kenya. In the moment when a team of serious professionals finds themselves laughing at something they failed at together, and in that laughter rediscovers something about each other — and about themselves — that the organization had been accidentally suppressing for years.

It is not regression. It is retrieval.

Retrieving something that was always there, underneath the professionalism, waiting for the right environment to make it safe to come out again.

The Question Worth Sitting With

Think about your team as it operates today.

Think about the last time someone offered an idea that surprised everyone — including themselves. The last time a meeting ended with more energy than it started with. The last time someone asked for help without it costing them something. The last time the group tried something that didn't work and responded with curiosity rather than blame.

Now think about the children they used to be.

That gap — between the collaborative instinct they were born with and the careful, managed, self-protective way they now show up in meetings — is not inevitable.

It is the result of environments. Of cultures. Of the accumulated signals that organizations send, day after day, about what is welcome here and what is not.

And environments can change.

What instinct did your team lose — and how do you get it back?

That question is worth more than an afternoon's discussion.

It might be worth an entirely different way of working together.

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At Propel 360, we work with young people through our Students' Support Program — and with adult teams through our Staff Support and Team Cohesion programs — because we believe that the instincts of genuine collaboration are not lost. They are waiting for the right environment to come back.

If this made you think of someone who needs to read it — send it to them.

Let's talk: 360propel@gmail.com | +254 741354292 | Jacton Ambalwa | propel360Kenya.loveable.app

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