We have all heard the phrase ‘children are our future’, but how much do we live by it? And actually, is there a fundamental skill that children can teach us grown up business heads right now?!

Affari are happy to acknowledge that a growing company like us needs to plan ahead…far ahead! Therefore, we have been busy in schools lately with the aim of inspiring some budding 8-9 year old designers, artists and marketers. And here is Larkfields Junior School’s Year 4 students with their fantastic work based on a promotional campaign to help stop deforestation!

So maybe these kids will progress in life and decide that they want to be a lawyer, or a chef or a fire fighter. But what really mattered to us is that, as a team, we all took some time out of our busy schedules and reinvested it into our community and the educational sectors around us that helped us get to where we are today.

Therefore, when we went to go and do the lesson with the lovely kids at Larkfields junior School, we had every intention of us being the teachers and the kids the students. But actually, these wonderful 8-year-olds taught us something of even greater value and inspiration…

They taught us that it’s OK to not always be so serious. It’s easy to get caught up in the grown up world of business, profit making, selling and competing. But sometimes you just have to stop trying so hard. An 8-year-old will usually happily admit that there is something that they don’t understand; this is how they learn and grow after all. We think this is one of the most important lessons that industry professionals should take on board.

Why, as adults, do we find it harder to acknowledge that we might not know everything there is to know about a certain aspect of whatever it is our work involves? Maybe we do need to learn more, maybe we need to collaborate with other people and share knowledge and the learning experience together in order to grow, evolve and innovate in the best ways possible.

As a design agency whose job it is to come up with new and fresh ways of marketing, we believe in this kind of collaboration above anything else. We like to sit down and simply TALK with our clients, generate ideas and come up with new ways of thinking and working as a team. We don’t want to just be competent and business savvy people to work with. We want to be good people to work with; we want to be nice people to work with! And if that means taking the same learning approach of an 8-year-old, then so be it!