At a certain point in junior high, I realized not everyone in class had to squint to see the blackboard. That’s when I asked my parents to get my eyes checked. I still remember the first time I stepped onto the street from the eyeglasses store. All of a sudden, trees weren’t just general green blobs; I could see the different leaves! For a few weeks after that, I kept noticing more and more details about the world, as if I were seeing things for the first time. Maintaining a beginner’s mind like this at work as well will help you make innovation habitual. Let’s see how.

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Beginner’s Mind Fades Away

Unfortunately, after a month or so had passed, I got used to seeing the world in HD. I no longer noticed all the vivid details around me. The same happens when you buy a new car and have the “new car smell” for a while, which makes you aware of the situation every time you sit in the car. Or when you switch jobs or apartments and the daily commute hasn’t yet become automatic… until it does. The beginner’s mind is reserved for beginnings, after all.

That’s why it’s incredibly important to notice the feedback and insights of new employees. People who just joined are not yet accustomed to how you do things, which means they just might point the finger at areas that can be improved that the others in the company don’t see (a bit like the frog slowly boiling in water, when a friend comes to visit, they just might mention it’s awfully hot here). When we have that at work, we get constant improvements, ideas for change, and innovation opportunities. However, what do we do once it wears off?

The Magic of Code Retreats

About 15 years ago, I facilitated one of the first code retreats in Israel (solely because I wanted to participate in one). If you’ve never heard of them, you can read more about them here. The part relevant to this article is that retreats focus on reigniting the joy and wonder of coding, to recreate the beginner’s mind. To do that, a lot of constraints are added, like not being able to use loops or having to model everything in a certain way.

Does that mean that we want people to never have conditionals in their code? No, that’s not really useful. But being forced to work like this for 45 minutes or so forces participants outside of their comfort zones and autopilot. We actually have to think about how to approach things, which is exactly what’s needed. The same trick can be used at work to cultivate innovation.

Manufacturing a Fresh Perspective

I believe this is incredibly helpful for maintaining an agile and fast-paced culture as a team matures (even if it doesn’t necessarily grow too big). To do that, you can add these constraints for real or solely as thought experiments during the planning of the work.

Become accustomed to asking things such as:

• Is there a way to create a POC of this in 10% of the time?
• If a competitor with zero legacy systems launched the same feature next month, what edge would they have over us?
• How would we design this if compute/storage/network cost were effectively free?
• If success were measured only by time to learning (not delivery), what experiment would we run first?
• What’s a “fake it till you make it” version of this feature that can be imperfect but get us to the market faster?
• How would we approach this if we had the intent of writing the least amount of code and relying mostly on other systems and services?

Like taking a new route to the office, stir things up from time to time. Don’t speak at a meeting where you usually do all the talking at and see what others have to say. Create a “minimally viable process”—cutting most meetings and managerial overhead for a week—and let the team have flexibility they’re not used to. You just might see some interesting things for the very first time.