Shoshin - The Art of Beginner’s Mind
I am confident everyone reading this is an expert at something. Whether it is interviewing, investigating, inventing or ice sculpting, you have an area of expertise. Perhaps you excel in several areas and well done if you do. Being an expert at something allows us to see patterns and probably outcomes that others don’t. We quickly make sense of complex patterns within our area of knowledge and thus can make advances and connections others may not.
When a chessboard is shown mid-game to a master chess player, they can recreate the board after only having seen it for a few seconds. Show them a board with random piece placement and they are no better than the rest of us at recreating it. This is because their thousands of hours of deliberate, focused practice allows them to see the game pattern and to understand what is going on; take away the meaningful pattern and the field is leveled. For an insightful discussion of this experiment and more, see Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code.
This depth of knowledge that we can call upon without thinking generally serves us immensely well when operating within our specialty. When I worked crime scenes as an FBI Evidence Response Team (ERT) Team Leader, seeing a certain pattern told me immediately where I should look for trace evidence or latent prints. Later, when planning for an interview as a Team Leader with the High-Value Detainee Group (HIG), certain patterns of facts and information quickly led me to generally accurate inferences about the kind of person I would be interviewing and how they may respond to different parts of the conversation.
But our expert minds also limit us. As we develop our specialized skill sets and form the accompanying neural pathways, our brains basically hard wire certain answers to certain patterns. It keeps us from seeing other possibilities and opportunities because our heavily myelinated brains have led us to an answer and our prefrontal cortex rationalizes for us why that is the right answer. This is why experienced physicians are not much better (and sometimes worse) at diagnosing than are interns, but the experienced physicians are far more confident in their assessments than are the interns. For an example of the broad research on this topic see here.
At times we are better served by stepping outside of our expert minds and returning to a state of beginner’s mind so that we may see the universe of possibilities. Our expert minds can still make sense of these for us, but if we stay solely within the confines of our expertise, we will never see them.
The Japanese term for beginner’s mind is Shoshin and Shunryu Suzuki explains it this way: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” In every talk I give I discuss the need to balance your beginner and expert minds and to let the beginner mind take over when it is important to see other options and possibly better solutions. Sometimes you have to step out of your cognitive trench and survey the landscape around you.
I’ve long prided myself on my ability to adopt this broader mindset when planning for an interview or in any novel situation and generally I think I’m good at this. Unfortunately, I was recently reminded that I still often fail by allowing my expert mind to take me to what must be the right answer and then rationalizing why that is the definite answer.
I’ve started teaching undergraduate courses in the Criminal Justice program at New England College. While teaching the concept of drawing inferences from available facts and information, the students were coming up with inferences about the given situation that my expert mind rebelled against. I wanted them to come to the inferences my years of professional experience had already locked in, but they were seeing far greater possibilities.
Once I had them walk me back through how they came to the inferences, based on the facts and information, and we discussed underlying assumptions, I saw that some of these inferences were completely plausible, and surely very creative. I was anchored on the inferences my skilled pattern recognition led me to and it has been an eye-opening opportunity to learn from their collective beginners’ point of view.
Being an expert is an achievement. You understand and experience things in a way most people will never be able to relative to your field. And the ability for our subconscious Type 1 thinking to quickly give us the right answer makes us so much more efficient. Yet, when we go through our field always on autopilot, there are so many creative and profitable opportunities we pass by. So, take some time each day to switch off the expert brain and consider situations through the lens of a curious beginner's mind. Just as I am confident you are an expert, I’m confident you will be happy with what you learn through seeing from a different perspective every so often.
