Why your workers' curiosity almost never lives up to its promise
And the counterintuitive way to generate stunning innovations from within
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summary
Curious employees have better individual performance and drive innovation across their company.
Due to these benefits, though, organizations fail to recognize when curiosity is incompatible with their ways of working.
A company will see little to no improvement — and could actually suffer — from a perfunctory push for curiosity among employees.
Useful curiosity is not so much an individual trait as an organizational trait.
Your company needs to go all in on curiosity for it to bear fruit.
[Source]
context
In the same seminal paper where Abraham Maslow established his now-famous hierarchy of needs, he argued that curiosity “makes the person bigger, wiser, richer, stronger, more evolved, more mature.”
Today, eight decades later, business leaders are more enamored with the idea of curiosity than ever before. For good reason, too: curious employees are proven to be more creative, more committed to their organization, more accepting of feedback, and to generally perform better than other employees. On top of these individual perks, curious employees are also the ones that fuel innovation at every level of a company. Talk about overachievers.
what’s the catch?
That romanticized picture of curiosity ignores some practical roadblocks.
At the personal level, curious exploration is exceptionally draining on cognitive resources. This makes curiosity a tough sell for the thousands of employees who already find themselves exhausted and unfocused when they get home from work. Workers gravitating to the path of least resistance will intuitively avoid getting too invested in new information.
Worse, curiosity sparks frustration when the information we’re curious about is unavailable. This is commonplace in work settings as curious employees bump up against organizationally imposed limits. Sometimes these limits are desirable, like restricting access to sensitive information; however, they are more often an unintended consequence of the structure of the organization, like scattering information across disconnected departments. (Silos stink.) In the long run, employees’ minor irritation at each curtailment of their curiosity can snowball into severe resentment towards their company. But usually, employees just give up on engaging with their curiosity at work.
Social barriers to curiosity are the most burdensome. Sadly, employees asking well-intentioned questions are regularly perceived as incompetent or insubordinate. As children, this is baked into us at school. Teachers want to like students labelled as curious and creative, but these students are consistently teachers’ least favorites. Rule-following is rewarded, and nose-poking is punished. This structure gets magnified at work, because unlike at school, employees expect to be measured by their productivity, not their learning. We come to accept that following our curiosity at work would likely be a breach of social norms, so we just “go along to get along.” We wait to ask our questions until someone else asks first… but then everyone else waits too. Nobody wants to be the odd one out. In the end, we train each other into misjudging curiosity as no more than a pesky indulgence.
is organization-wide curiosity really possible then?
Organizational curiosity is definitely still doable in the real world. The issues above are not pitfalls of curiosity itself, but of unfocused and incomplete curiosity initiatives. They show why curious behavior doesn’t automatically emerge from curious people. And they are the key to why so many strategic pushes for curiosity don’t work.
Ordinarily, when a company wants to get in on the benefits of curiosity, they create schemes to encourage curiosity among their people. Consultants are brought in, slide decks are presented, and action plans are codified. Maybe the idea involves a seminar for managers, or a tweak to the onboarding curriculum, or even a whole new hiring process. Everyone pats themselves on the back, hopeful that their new program will improve productivity and foster a culture of innovation that keeps the company one jump ahead of its competitors. Then… nothing happens.
This familiar disappointment is due to a misconception about the nature of curiosity. We think about curiosity as an individual trait, but we need to start thinking about it as an organizational one. The responsibility falls on the entire business to deliberately inject and accept curiosity into every facet of the day-to-day. Curiosity is not an outcome; it is a modus operandi. It does not appear because of a tidy initiative; it arises naturally from a constellation of operational habits. Only when curiosity is a pillar of an organization’s identity can it really shine.
praxis
The foundation of practicable curiosity is surprisingly straightforward. Virtually everyone behaves curiously in the right environment, and virtually no one behaves curiously in the wrong environment. No matter your role, you can make your environment more amenable to curiosity.
for anyone
Brandishing your own curiosity is the single best way to encourage others to do the same. Ask questions, challenge assumptions, and experiment relentlessly. By taking the leap yourself, you give others the confidence to follow suit. Most teams will welcome these behaviors — almost three quarters (72%) of managers consider curiosity a “very valuable” trait in their employees — they just need someone to get the ball rolling.
Less accepting teams require slightly more nuance. Don’t let that stop you. If you’re careful, you can skirt any potential stumbling blocks by mastering what Todd Kashdan, a top curiosity researcher (and apparently a fellow Substacker!), refers to as the art of insubordination. Underlying this art are two essential tenets.
First, pick your battles carefully. Your curiosity should be constructive, not just intellectually interesting. Make sure your questions and challenges have the potential to advance your team’s understanding of the task or problem at hand. While bold defiance of the status quo is needed for bold changes, this only works for teams already making curiosity a cornerstone of their process. For others, these brash challenges are unhelpfully provocative. Stay disciplined.
Second, back others up when they reveal their curiosity. Instantly shutting down others’ suggestions is a surefire way to make them think twice about sharing in the future. The less open your environment is, the more open you need to be. Even one person can springboard a complete overhaul of their team’s approach to curiosity.
Speak up and make yourself heard… Listen to others who seek to do the same. But for heaven’s sake… be smart about it.
— Kashdan, 2022, p. 14
for strategists and entrepreneurs
Above all, to elevate curiosity within your business, your commitment to it needs to be visible. Make it a core value, and certainly don’t stop there. Ensure that every manager not only accepts curiosity (their own and others’), but delights in it. Ensure that every human in your organization has the opportunity to inspect and dissect what interests them, both for their good and the good of the business. And to reap the greatest rewards from curiosity, ensure that both time and space are dedicated to the practice of curiosity.
An extreme example of dedicating time to curiosity can be found in what 3M calls their 15% Culture or, more famously, what Google called 20% Time. For the uninitiated, these programs let employees spend a percentage of their paid time over a given period working on personal side projects. As Google’s former SVP of People Operations, Laszlo Bock, put it, “if you’re comfortable with the amount of freedom you’ve given your employees, you haven’t gone far enough.” By giving employees time to pursue projects that truly ignited their curiosity, these programs engendered some incredible innovations. Google News, Gmail, and AdSense all began as an employee’s pet project.
Such extremes are not the ideal, however. Despite popularizing the concept, even Google itself has abandoned 20% Time. Why? Because while it achieved amazing outcomes, it just isn’t sustainable for a mature business. That kind of freedom is wasteful. If you let thousands of employees throw a dart at the board, eventually one of them is bound to hit the bullseye — but you also have a lot of holes in the wall.
The answer is that employees need the freedom to explore any idea, but not the freedom to pursue any idea. All ideas need to be validated, regardless of where they came from. But that first part — the exploration phase — draws from employees’ diverse experiences and unique interests. Employees could thread their knowledge together into novel insights at home, but at work, they are focused, surrounded by other smart people to discuss ideas with, and likely have exclusive access to some phenomenal sources of information. Consequently, employees should have some latitude in their use of the business’s resources (e.g., time, money, and people) to investigate the ideas that really intrigue them, and your business should expressly offer these resources for that end.
If this sounds like an unwise investment for your organization, then you should reconsider whether curiosity needs any emphasis. Be honest with yourself and your employees. It might make more sense to have a bog-standard R&D department, or a beefed-up version of one, like Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works. (A dedicated R&D unit is still helpful for businesses that have undergone a curiosity transformation.) Confining the business’s investment in curiosity to one team obviously hurts innovation, but that’s not such a loss for some businesses in some industries.
wrap-up
Too many leaders look to curiosity as a quick win — the silver bullet for a lethargic company and apathetic employees. That’s not at all what it is. Curiosity can be an organizational superpower, but it requires steadfast commitment from everyone.
As individuals, we can accelerate our own careers and our team’s success through intelligently baring our curiosity even in situations where it feels like a risk. Don’t be afraid to break the mold.
As leaders, we can expand our business’s capacity for innovation by bringing all employees into the process of innovation. Invest in your employees’ curiosity, and they just might surprise you.