Shoshin (初心)—beginner's mind—is antidote for the Law of Fluency.
Beginner's mind is a principle in Japanese martial arts and Zen Buddhism. Experts are reminded to remain open-minded, eager, humble, attentive to detail, cautious about preconception.
In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities. In the expert's mind there are few.
The Law of Fluency: expertise hides effort and complexity in work. Experts become fluent in their practice, in the work they're doing, in the faint signals they perceive, and the timing and subtlety of their actions. Expertise makes it hard even for the expert to explain what it is they do or how they know what to do or when to do it. For the expert, the difficult work becomes mundane, ordinary, and not noteworthy.
Experts working together often do not notice the depth of their communication and the complexity of their common ground. They can take whole landscapes for granted and thereby attend to the faint signals and the outliers.
For non-experts, all the things the experts keep in their heads, remain invisible and inaccessible. The words shared between experts mean different things in the context of the systems at hand.
Experts who practice beginner's mind are suspicious of their own expertise and are thereby able to continue to grow. The skills that matter must be closely connected to reality.
"What am I missing?"
Experts who fail to practice beginner's mind assume, even unconsciously, that others in the conversation share the same expertise. The "obvious" details go left unspoken. The fundamental common ground breakdown rears it's head.
What we want is humble engineering.