TOP TOC 
Agile . since Jun 23 . Index . DOCs TOP TOC
§ In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few.” [3]
It is the open mind, the attitude that includes both doubt and possibility, the ability to see things always as fresh and new. It is needed in all aspects of life. Beginner's mind is the practice of Zen mind.
Perhaps first described by Zen Buddhists in its relation to No Mind, Beginner’s Mind is a state of few limits.
Beginner’s Mind is distinct from, but interrelated with, No Mind. Beginner’s Mind happens when the thinker is unsure of his boundaries. The thinker opens himself up and thoroughly tests his environment. No Mind is a meditative state in which the practitioner leaves behind all the dreck in his life, allowing himself to just be.
Modern psychology distinguishes between the two because Beginner’s Mind can also be experienced outside of No Mind meditation. In fact, most people automatically assume it when they are placed in a situation outside but near the limits of their comfort zone. If a person is otherwise comfortable with his environment but doesn’t understand one thing, then he will usually try stuff until he figures that one part out. This state of trying to reconcile one’s past experiences with an environment that doesn’t quite fit is Beginner’s Mind.
Beginner’s Mind is the key behind the phenomenon of Beginner’s Luck: a person doing something for the first time often does it much better than he does after he’s practiced for a while. Because he tries more approaches, and tries them rapidly, a person in Beginner’s Mind is more likely to succeed at a task than one who thinks he understands how it works.
My team at Silver Platter discovered that Beginner’s Mind is a very efficient way to solve programming problems. However, Beginner’s Mind is generally a transitory state. As soon as a person has figured out the bounds of his current situation, he tends to drop to a lower-energy cognitive state.
Whereas Flow depends on stability, Beginner’s Mind depends on instability. We found that Beginner’s Mind can be maintained as a stable state by simply changing things around frequently enough — by surfing the edge of chaos.
Agile . since Jun 23 . Index . DOCs TOP TOC
One of the key insights of Behavioral Interviewing [4], [5], [6] is that there is a difference between competencies and skills. The difference is simple. People can learn skills in a matter of months. People can’t learn competencies in less than several years. There aren’t many things that fall between — qualifications are almost always skills or competencies.
When organizing our team, this means that we needed to treat the two categories differently. Skills were transmitted extremely quickly around the team because we spent most of our time in Beginner’s Mind. We therefore assumed that any skill could be supplied by any member of our team.
Competencies, however, are unique to an individual. Many of them are even mutually contradictory. For example, it is difficult to find someone who is both Creative and good at Following a Process.
Behavioral Interviewing supplies us with around 30 such competencies. Every task requires more than one. Most tasks require three or four and could take advantage of a half-dozen or more. It is often impossible to find such a set in any two people, much less in any two people on the same team.
This understanding leads to the realization that Beginner’s Mind can’t provide everything needed to increase pair efficiency. Distinguishing between competencies and skills caused us to experiment with task ownership and assignment processes. We found processes that let us apply Beginner’s Mind to provide the skills, but still apply each competency when it was needed.