The Curse of Expertise
I once read that the age you are most likely to survive a plane crash in the jungle is five. You’re old enough to have basic survival skills, but young enough to quickly adapt to new circumstances. Unlike an adult in this situation, a five-year-old will not force the jungle to fit their mental map of home, but will just make a new map for their new reality. It’s this adaptability that is partly credited to the recent survival of four children lost in the Colombian jungle after a plane crash, for over forty days.
This beginner’s mindset is credited not just with survival but invention. It was a child’s simple question that sparked the idea for the Polaroid camera. She was just three. Her father Edward Land (a brilliant inventor of his time) was photographing his precocious daughter on a family holiday to Santa Fe in 1943. When the picture was done, she impatiently asked, “Why do we have to wait to see it?” Up until that point, Land, who had built a career on imagining new possibilities, never questioned why you had to wait for the film to be professionally developed. It was a great question that led to a great problem to solve and ultimately a great product. A classic example of a kid not being locked into the norms surrounding a category and quickly eliminating a “rule” that didn’t need to be there.
The Power of a Beginner’s Mindset
The reason a beginner’s mindset is so powerful is the same reason expertise is a curse. If an idea is a new and valuable solution to a problem, the superpower is finding the new and valuable ways in. This requires escaping your existing thought patterns—what I like to think of as the mega-skill of creativity. The beginner achieves this mindset effortlessly because they don’t yet have rigid thought patterns to escape. The expert is the exact opposite—so stuck in their thought patterns that their thoughts are now subconscious and beyond the reach of examination. Lucian Leape, a Harvard pediatric surgeon who has made a study of medical error, explains this beautifully. “A defining trait of experts is that they move more and more problem solving into an automatic mode. With repetition, a lot of mental functioning becomes automatic and effortless—like driving a car.” This automatic thinking is great when you need to act quickly at a high level, but not so great when you have to find a new and valuable way to solve a problem.
Expertise also has an inverse relationship with curiosity and questioning. As Frank Lloyd Wright acknowledged, “An expert is someone who has stopped thinking because he ‘knows’—if you know, there is no reason to ask.” Questioning is driven by what we don’t know, as Stuart Firestien argues in Ignorance: How It Drives Science one of the keys to scientific discovery is the willingness of scientists to embrace ignorance. Being stuck in your current situation, lacking curiosity about what’s next, and not asking enough questions not only impacts us at an individual level but is also the reason many great companies have failed. Blockbuster was trapped in its limited perception of home entertainment and turned down the chance to buy the future—Netflix. Nokia couldn’t see beyond its flip-phone expertise and stubbornly rejected touchscreens and the Android platform. And the little known, but very profitable, Swedish company Facit went to the grave in the 1960s being the world-renowned experts in, wait for it . . . mechanical calculators.
How Can I Be an Expert and a Beginner?
The world does need experts after all. You may be asking “How can I empty my brain to become a beginner again? And quickly fill it back up to be the expert I need to be?” I see you. I hear you. Some thoughts to leave you with . . .
Expertise is great for judging ideas. A beginner’s mindset is great for generating them. So know when to leverage each. Learn from Brown University’s Brain Science program, which partners undergraduates with graduates. Who’s your beginner mindset partner? Could that partner even be AI? AI has more mental flexibility than we do and is already being used in science to “hallucinate” for the experts. Always question your assumptions, even going so far as to write them out and define the opposites. I’ll leave you with this marvelous thought from Warren Berger’s fantastic book, A More Beautiful Question “In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you take for granted.”
Expertise is always an asset. Question mark.
Sources:
Complications: A Surgeon’s Note on an Imperfect Science
The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes
A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas