Scout v Soldier Mindset

#209

In Julia Galef’s book, The Scout Mindset, she talks about cultivating a habit of improved reasoning, seeking out blind spots, and changing one’s course after recognizing mistakes. She distinguishes between a soldier, who is trained to defend their own ideas aggressively whereas a scout who leads the soldiers has to adopt an exploratory mindset.

I learnt about this concept (Thanks again, Dad!) towards the end of 2021 when I was considering transitioning into a managerial role at work. We made a side-by-side comparison chart of how being an IC (Individual Contributor) aka engineer is more like a solider mindset whereas becoming a manager would involve adopting a scout mindset:

Software Development Engineer (SDE)	Software Development Manager (SDM)
Direct task action	GTD through others
Simple planning, scheduling	Multi-level planning, iterations
Fewer dependencies (only tech)	People (complex), multiple dependencies
Well-defined goals, completion, criteria ('J')	Fuzzy at times, undefined or ill-defined, evolving goalpost ('P')
Hard skills > soft skills	Soft skills >> hard skills
Sense of accomplishment, short-time cycle, many small wins	Always more to do, varying time cycles, a few big wins
Mostly soldier mindset: "kill it"	Combination of soldier and scout mindset: "find, explore"

While this has helped me get comfortable in and grow into the manager role, I’ve realized that in general, in life, by adopting the scout mindset, we can learn to be more enlightened, curious learners, less confrontational, and make better decisions.