“Can I shut your door? I've got an idea - and it's either the dumbest thing an attorney has ever said, or it's the key to taking this case to the Supreme Court…” And with that introduction, a rookie attorney introduced a radical new sequence of logic which propelled one of the world’s largest law firms to one of its most celebrated victories.

As my friend Dr. Beau Lotto says, pairing novices with experienced folks dramatically increases the likelihood of achieving a breakthrough; they tend to look in unexpected places (like old Russian math papers!) and ask important questions that experts overlook, but value tremendously. (turns out we’ve got quite a bit of a theme running on the topic of the novice perspective)

But how does someone with experience know where they’re in need of a fresh perspective? After all, most of their knowledge is solid, so how to discover the exceptionally rare areas where that experience should be challenged? It’s similar to the age-old challenge of identifying one’s own assumptions: if you knew which wrong assumptions were affecting your thinking, you wouldn’t have the problem in the first place! The problem is, we don’t even know the search parameters for a fresh perspective!

Luckily, knowing where one needs a fresh perspective — and thus where to seek for novices to compliment one’s thinking — isn’t the best question. Instead, a better question is, “Am I approachable? Does a novice with a radical new perspective feel like I’m safe to approach?” In my mind, the story about the young attorney doesn’t actually start with the moment he asks if he can shut the door; it really starts with the interactions that the senior partner had with him before that moment, which established the trust and confidence to take a risk and be willing to say “the dumbest thing an attorney has ever said.”

Rather than fixating on identifying the areas where we need a novice perspective — a near-impossible task — a better use of one’s energy is in courting approachability: ensuring that I’m the kind of person a newbie can trust, and is willing to share a radical new perspective with.

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