Five Dimensions of Curiosity

Being curious helps! Curious people have helped spawn innovations, inventions, discoveries, and the world and humanity forward in positive ways. The curiosity of individuals in organizations helps move organizations forward and grow the business. A recent HBR article suggested five ways to bolster curiosity. I recap here for things I take away from it and may be helpful for peeps who coach and consult with teams.

1. Hire for Curiosity

In 2004 Google famously put up a billboard on highway 101 in the heart of silicon valley posing the puzzle for finding the first 10 digit prime in consecutive digits of e.com. The answer 7427466391.com led the curious to solve and landing an invite to apply at the search engine giant. Google took an unusual method of hiring curious candidates who saw the billboard and attempted to answer the puzzle. Eric Schmidt the ex-Google CEO famously said: "We want curious people because we run this company on questions, not answers".

It's not the curiosity killed the cat kind of curious we are looking for. It is spotting the inquisitive ones who are looking for better alternatives, puzzled enough to run curious experiments, lost enough in the what could be or what if's or as IDE a design consulting firm puts it looking for T-shaped employees. T-shaped meaning vertically having the predisposition to the creative thinking process and horizontally a predisposition for collaboration across disciplines displaying the qualities of empathy and curiosity.

2. Model Inquisitiveness

Organizational leaders can encourage curiosity by being inquisitive themselves. Chip Conley in 'Wisdom @Work' has cited well when your posture and position yourself as an intern to ask questions of your teams and listen, you will learn more and more. I am learning this myself asking questions and to answers that raise newer questions helps me from avoiding suggestions, blurting out non-relevant knowledge or ignorance. Being inquisitive as a team requires a breed of analysts who are data and information chasing from the perspective of figuring out the right questions even before finding the answers.

3. Emphasize learning goals

The HBR article cited the example of Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger who landed the commercial aircraft on the Hudson River saving hundreds of lives. Every time the plane pushed back from the gate Captain Sully reminded himself of "What can I learn today?". Captain Sully reports in the 208 seconds he had to make decisions on landing the plane he was prepared for various alternatives than the default ones he had trained for. Continuous learning and tracking them will put you in a position to evaluate through alternatives. It will give you perspectives from what you have kept and what you have eliminated. I am reminded of the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu who said: "To acquire knowledge learn every day, to acquire wisdom purge every day".

4. Let employees explore and broaden their interests.

Organizations don't do this well from various kinds of fears of employees leaving to cultures that have not been intentionally fostered for growth.  The article cited an example of United Technologies that budgeted and gave its employees nearly $12K in tuition assistance to pursue their degrees of interest. Starbucks pays for tuition for their baristas for their undergraduate degrees. Sending people on training and allocation of training budgets in budget-strapped organizations takes deliberate courage and faith. Leaders need to resolve and reconcile to the fact that they would rather have trained and developed team members rather than untrained and underdeveloped employees that will cost the company eventually and stifle any kind of innovation. The ones that foster a culture of curiosity and invest in their teams to broaden interests not only help them professionally develop but trust capital increases.

5. Have "Why?", "What If" and "How might we...?" Culture or days

The discovery of the Polaroid camera was the result of a three-year old's question "Why do we have to wait for the picture?" that inspired her father Edwin Land to build the instant camera. Why is ubiquitous in children vocabulary. I recently read another book called "Get Weird" in which the author explains the shame of not being the same and how being different or being curious is squashed away at an early age. The epidemic of killing curiosity at younger ages and instilling the value of structure and sameness is alarming which will have serious implications for the future.

The article aptly conveys to encourage curiosity -  leaders should teach employees how to ask good questions. In my recent upcoming massive change management project I am leading,  I have bantered for several months with leadership trying to convey that at arriving at the right questions is more important than arriving at the right answers and even more important than looking for the right tool to buy or build for the future. Because for the right insights we want to get, and the right data we want to measure and for the right strategic objectives we want to set will determine what the right questions are. This will then help in employing the right strategies we want to execute  The Why's, the What if's, and how might be, are the right questions to start with.