It's funny how the idea of a team doesn't really change with age. For children, if all the players on a team appear equal to one another, a beautiful and age-appropriate interdependent dance happens towards achieving a common goal.

Appearing equal to one another as people get older is where it gets more complicated.

With a group of adults, the possible permutations of ideas about privacy, collaboration, reputation and risk among teammates quickly approaches an incomprehensible number simply because of the amount of life lived. It's inconceivable to think that a team of equals could ever exist among adults.

Children don't go looking for equals. Children simply attempt to make a team work because their common goal is not complicated by learned behaviors of privacy, politics, reputation and risk. Children are less interested in finding a team of equals than they are in achieving a common goal. Each teammate plays a role, and sometimes that role is to sit out so long as the common goal is met.

As this planet becomes evermore interdependent, our future heroes will be the magicians who create goals where all humans can feel part of the team without having to subject themselves to the impossible task of attempting to build teams of equals (that's what droids will be for).

As insensitive as this sounds, feelings are hurt not because the left out player is un-equal to the others but rather because that player was in a time and place where the goals of that group were not consciously inclusive. Changing the goals to be inclusive does not mean a dumbing down of the games people play and the markets in which they take place, it means changing the way we educate humans starting as early as kindergarten.

Educating for inclusivity means teaching deeper systems thinking, studying chaos, patterns, ambiguity, and new narratives that help us to imagine humans with a capacity for empathy that is 10-fold what we have today. Our imagination has always come first, and with it follows goals that make fiction a reality.