Could an 11-year-old understand – or even run – your business?

Have you ever explained to a child what you do for a living? Try it. Encourage them to keep asking questions. It’s revealing. The seemingly naïve question is more often than not extremely helpful.

An 11-year-old should be able to readily understand food manufacturing or retail, including a brand’s wider social purpose, its social and environmental impacts, and its marketing and comms. Crucially, an 11-year-old might be unafraid to ask the hard questions. Why do you target your products at children? Why are you only making or selling food and drink that is bad for us? What are you doing to protect the planet?

The curiosity, openness and imagination of youth is powerful – something that business leaders can and should learn from. Do you respond to the carrot or stick? If you’re a fan of the enticing carrot, then my plea to those working in food and drink companies that want to prosper in the future is to better understand, collaborate with and empower young people. If you prefer to be metaphorically threatened with a stick, then heed the warning: ‘Big food beware; ignore young people at your peril.’

Kudos to the Consumer Goods Forum for inviting youth activists from Bite Back to its annual global summit earlier in the summer. The young people that participated urged food and drink companies to prioritise their health. The cynic in me worries it could have been a PR exercise for the manufacturers and retailers involved. However, the optimist in me hopes the young people were genuinely listened to and their views acted upon.

How might we take that engagement a step further? At my son’s school, one of the pupils asked to be headteacher for the day – and surprisingly, the school said yes, good idea. It got me thinking. Would food companies put an 11-year-old in charge for the day?

If not, why not? You’d have to have safeguards in place and explain the basics, but the process of doing that might in itself reveal a lot, including parts of the business that are unnecessarily complicated.

I’m waiting for the headline: 11-year-old put in charge of Greggs for a day, a pre-teen is the new temporary boss of Lidl, a school child takes over as CEO of The Co-op this week. A naïve suggestion? Maybe, but we need more naïve questions – which very often turn out to be the toughest, bravest questions.