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Continuous Beginner’s Mind and Creativity

When people are in Beginner’s Mind they learn faster and achieve more. Similarly, people tend to be more creative when they only partially understand a situation. Because they don’t know all of the limits yet, they don’t have as much difficulty seeing past them.

Pair churn ensured that every pair had a member in Beginner’s Mind at all times.

        In addition to gathering the metrics, we also asked people how they’d felt under various approaches. One of the most commonly stated responses was that the swaps were too frequent. It took people about 90 minutes to get fully up to speed on a new problem, and then they’d get swapped away. Most people felt like they were constantly drinking from the fire hose, unable to catch up.

        We talked about this in a couple of weekly retrospectives. We discussed Beginner’s Mind. After a couple of weeks, everyone saw how much more they were learning than they had in any other situation in their lives. The fire hose became a thrill ride. It became a challenge.

We found that with pair swaps below 90 minutes, some information was lost with each pair swap, requiring the new pair to frequently ask questions of the person who had just left the task. With longer pairings no information was lost, but after 90 minutes the pair’s velocity dropped notably.

On a related subject, teaching is a great way to learn. This is especially true if the teacher is relatively new to the subject.

Alternating 90 minute swaps caused each pair to contain one person in Beginner’s Mind and another who was teaching the subject he’d just learned. This strategy proved to be a phenomenally effective combination. It strongly outperformed the situations where we developed an expert by leaving a person on the task for a longer duration.

Pair churn also maximizes the effect of pair net. Information flows better. Everyone masters tools faster. Everyone learns how the data are organized in each system faster. Everyone learns new coding techniques faster.

        One telling example of rapid pair net happened accidentally to the Silver Platter team. Around 10 am I was driving. While doing a bit of copy and paste, I accidentally hit Ctrl + Shift + V instead of Ctrl + V.

        In Visual Studio, Ctrl + Shift + V operates a paste stack. It remembers everything that you have copied in the past. Pasting inserts the top of the stack. Pressing the keys again before doing anything else replaces the just-pasted stuff with the next item in the history. You can continue to pres the key combination to go back further in your history. This makes it easy to copy from a couple of sources at once and paste them all together.

        My partner and I noticed this and spent a few minutes figuring out what the weird behavior was. We then went on with our work. Over the rest of the day, we swapped as normal. Once in a while, the paste stack would be useful, so I’d teach it to my partner.

        Around 4 that afternoon I was again driving. My navigator saw me doing some copy and paste and took the keyboard to show me a neat trick — the paste stack. I was surprised that he’d seen it, so I stood up and asked the bullpen how many of them knew about the paste stack.

        All 11 people had learned about it that day.