One of the early chapters sets the message for the book with the following quote:

The author raises some interesting ideas around how to get the best out of people by suggesting that the best way to do this is to let them do what they want but to watch them. Although he then went out to reference this back as a metaphor for controlling our own thoughts I was reminded of the Netflix culture slide show which I came across lately in terms of how they give employees freedom but expect them to act in the organisation’s best interest rather than expecting employees to follow a lot of rules.

One thing I really liked was the emphasis on listening to what someone says 'without having your own idea [in mind]...forgot what you have in your mind and just listen to what he says'. I think one problem we can run into when listening to other people is that we extract the bits of what they say which fit in with what we believe - something known as the confirmation bias. I actually found an old post of mine which lists some mistakes we commonly make when listening to others speak. It makes quite interesting reading. Another quote from the book sums up a more useful approach:

He goes on to suggest that we should have no negative or positive feelings towards what someone says to us and that we should give up our preconceived ideas and subjective opinions which I didn’t think made much sense in the software development game since a lot of what we do is about assessing the merits of different approaches. The beginner’s mind entry on the C2 wiki makes more sense by describing Ward Cunningham’s approach:

The author suggests that 'when you do something just to do it should be your purpose' which seems somewhat similar to the idea of focusing on the process in Agile instead of always on the outcome of what we’re doing. While a result focus can be helpful I often notice that important things like the quality of what we’re making get dropped by the wayside if we focus too much just on completion. I do think there is some need to focus on whether what we’re doing is actually improving us (although the book advises against this) and I recently came across Chad Fowler’s idea of always asking 'Am I better than yesterday?'.

It is pointed out then when learning zaizen we cannot expect rapid progress but instead that we will progress little by little which I think is pretty much the same in software development. With nearly all skills a lot of practice is needed - as Talent is Overrated points out - we don’t just become an overnight sensation but need to work our way through the Dreyfus Model for each skill gradually improving our level.