Shoshin – beginner’s mind – is the Japanese Zen concept that opens doors that expertise over time slams shut. In Zen monasteries, monks sweep every day as if for the first time – the task isn’t about being the best or the fastest but about encountering every fallen leaf, every bit of dirt with a fresh mind. During a Japanese tea ceremony, true masters perform each movement with the fresh curiosity of someone who has never poured tea before, noticing subtleties that are invisible to the habituated eye.
A beginner’s mind reveals what we have left to observe and learn. But we still need the expert’s mind, too. I learned about shoshin while living in Japan and studying aikido, a martial art that trains you to harness an attacker’s motion using throws, strikes, and pins, and to redirect their force. Aikido masters develop muscle memory through thousands of repetitions until a technique becomes instinct. When I started training with a bokken, which is a wooden substitute for a sword, my teacher told me that eventually the sword “will strike,” rather than “you will strike.” Reaching this state would require both deep expertise and complete beginner’s openness.
To my more business-minded readers: This is what Steve Jobs meant when he said, “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” Jobs combined rigorous technical knowledge with childlike wonder. In fact, he too became deeply interested in Japan and even took up calligraphy lessons with no practical purpose – only to later revolutionize typography in computing. He mastered rules in order to transcend them. Again, the key here is to transcend … not break.
When we work with our clients, we apply a shoshin mindset to see opportunities and risks that others can’t. For example, we once worked with an auto manufacturer that asked us about the future of cars. If we had explored that question at face value, we would have thought about cars as we know them today – metal and wheels on asphalt. To explore a full spectrum of plausible futures, we needed to approach the subject with broad minds. We posed another question instead: “What is the future of moving people, pets, and objects around?”
Oftentimes this process begins with a “what if” question. We asked another client, a food manufacturing company, “What if food production didn’t require soil, land, or animals?” This question opened pathways to exploring vertical farming, synthetic proteins, and distributed food sovereignty, which revealed new opportunities for M&A and new revenue streams. Similarly, we asked a pharmaceutical company, “What if the goal isn’t treatment, but no disease at all?” which led to prescient early investment in genetic medicine, advanced diagnostics, and better interventions.
The wisdom lies in knowing when to switch between mindsets. Expert’s mind builds the necessary foundation – you can’t effectively transcend conventions you don’t understand. But the beginner’s mind prevents expertise from calcifying into dogma. This isn’t an either/or proposition but a rhythm: Gather knowledge like a master, then approach each moment like a beginner. The job for leaders is to learn this dance between knowing everything and knowing nothing at all.
