Learning to Plan and Execute Multi-Step Projects: The Blueprint Protocol
The Saturday morning my daughter Sophie announced that she wanted to build a treehouse in our backyard in Portland, Oregon, I should have said no. She was ten years old, and the gap between her vision, a fully enclosed structure with windows, a door, and a rope ladder, and her current skill set, which included hammering a nail into a piece of wood with moderate accuracy, was approximately the size of the Grand Canyon. Instead, I said something that would commit both of us to the most ambitious project we had ever undertaken together: "Okay. Let us plan it." What followed was three months of false starts, frustrated tears, misaligned boards, and at least one trip to the emergency room for a splinter the size of a toothpick. But what also followed was something I had never seen Sophie develop before: the ability to take a large, overwhelming goal and break it into manageable steps, to sequence those steps logically, to gather the resources required for each step, and to persist through the inevitable failures and revisions that any complex project demands. When the treehouse was finally finished, it was crooked, the door did not quite close, and the rope ladder was more decorative than functional. But Sophie stood in front of it with her hands on her hips and a look of pure, unadulterated ownership on her face, and I knew that what she had built was not just a treehouse. She had built the cognitive architecture for planning and executing any complex task she would ever undertake. ...