Escaping From Old Ideas

John Maynard Keynes | Beginner's Mind, Cognitive Entrenchment | What Happens When You Take Kids’ Phones Away? | Workslop

The difficulty lies not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.

| John Maynard Keynes

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Beginner’s Mind

Not to play quote one-upmanship, but this quote by Keynes reminds me of a famous aphorism from the Zen master, Shunryu Suzuki:

In the mind of the beginner, there are many possibilities. In the mind of the expert there are few.

It is altogether too easy to become settled in the patterns and practices that we have adopted to become productive, effective, and comfortable, to lose the unfixity of the beginner’s mind.

Of course, while these words have been said, we are forced to return to them in our individual lives. As Andre Gide once wrote,

Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.

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Cognitive Entrenchment

I was reintroduced to the Keynes quote above, from which I took the title for this issue of workfutures.io, in an essay by Michelle Taite, The Power of Being an Amateur, in which she makes a highly personalized case for seeking out novel experiences where you are a rank beginner. As she says,

The more you become “somebody” in your chosen field (recognized, accomplished, authoritative), the more your thinking tends to calcify, limiting your flexibility and creativity.

I would generalize that a hair, and say that the more expert you become, the more of the beginner’s openness you lose.

She refers to a term that was new to me: cognitive entrenchment.

One notable concept, recently introduced to explain this decline, is known as cognitive entrenchment, which is concerned with a high level of stability in one’s domain schemas (Dane, 2010). This entrenchment or “situated fixation,” from our proposition, may act to deter the flexibility and/or willingness of a person to adapt to a new context or situation. Some writers, on this basis, have argued that cognitive entrenchment would help explain the demise of some experts and/or why some students have difficulties adapting to new situations.

[…]

Expertise may constrain a person from being flexible, innovative, and/or creative to ongoing changes.