The Beginner’s Mind

Celia was at her desk late that night.  She was full of ideas for how to implement their winning innovation challenge, but she knew that starting with a solution was the wrong way to go about it.  As the leader of the team, it was important that she set the right expectations for the project.  The burning question was how to get the team to adopt a beginner’s mindset when they were all deep experts in their respective fields?

“In the Beginner’s Mind there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind there are few.” – Shunryu Suzuki

The Beginner’s Mind

Celia had been reading about how to adopt a beginner’s mindset.  As they started the project she knew that the key to guiding the team to innovative solutions was listening to customers with curiosity and using their own intuition (alongside their experience).  But people were uncomfortable approaching a customer discussion as an opportunity to learn instead of a place to teach, especially in the customer support organization.  The team would rather test their own ideas than listen to those of the customer.  Yet if they wanted to discover customers’ pain points that would open the door to new solution ideas, they needed to really listen openly.

One idea was to include those with less expertise on the team.  They had assembled a group of experts, but what about bringing in one of their newer hires?  Celia ran through the employee roster in her head until she came to Joseph. He had been with the company for less than a year and was full of enthusiasm.  He still had a beginner’s mind and this would be a great opportunity for him. She would have to coach the team on remaining open to Joseph’s observations, rather than discounting his ideas as impractical.

To that end, Celia also thought the team needed to spend some time learning how to interview.  They would need to ask open ended questions, ask why their customers did things the way they did.  Walking a mile in their customer’s shoes was cliché, but that was essentially what they needed to do.  She thought they might even visit customers so they could observe them in their own environment.

She typed up a quick email to Jack and Kim with her thoughts.  “Let’s do a one day offsite that includes a customer visit so we can really immerse ourselves in this approach,” she concluded.  “This will allow our innovation team to see what takes place in the customer’s organization, and how well we meet their needs.”

Would this approach work in your organization? Tell us what you think.