Curiosity is a Competitive Advantage in Business

Being curious and asking ‘Why?’ is as essential for business agility, innovation, and transformation as knowledge and skills. Yet too often we suppress our curiosity, or we wish others would not ask too many questions, because we believe curiosity might slow down a process, and can ‘rock the boat’.

Sometimes stifling curiosity is appropriate. However, too often it isn’t. By not asking questions and being curious we miss valuable opportunities for transformation and growth.

According to Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, nothing is interesting to us unless we focus our attention on it. And until something is interesting to us, we cannot explore, experiment, and exploit opportunities. Fortunately, we can cultivate curiosity and the ability to significantly improve our business agility, innovation, and growth.

Table of Contents

1.     What is Curiosity?

2.     Business Benefits of Curiosity

3.     Barriers to Curiosity

4.     Developing Curiosity

5.     Conclusion

What is Curiosity?

The ability to innovate depends on the ability to produce novel business ideas, which many people assume means intelligence – or what we know. However, innovation intelligence is largely a function of how well we can learn.

Real learning that results in innovation, transformation, and growth depends on curiosity: recognizing, exploring (understanding), experimenting (learning), and resolving conceptual conflicts.  

Although curiosity does have random elements to it, it is not the random seeking of more information, more experience, or more novelty, for the sake of superficial stimulation. Curiosity requires a combination of mental flexibility, openness to new ideas, and creativity while looking for patterns. This allows recognition of gaps in understanding, and the ability to identify how to address those gaps.

Therefore, curiosity is a process of:

• asking a range of questions from a range of perspectives,
• focusing energy on being interested and observing, and
• building and updating mental frameworks to understand the situation and context, which results in more questioning.

Business Benefits of Curiosity

Business agility, innovation, and transformation depend on pre-existing knowledge (mechanical facts and processes), as well as expertise, the understanding of how and why things work the way they do, and how we can influence change. Expertise is developed through curiosity, or the creative conflict and resolution arising from a diversity of perspectives and expertise.

However, expertise and diversity create challenges. Pre-existing knowledge can cause rigidity and resistance to change, creating biases and path dependence (eg patterns of thinking and behavior). And diversity can feel unsettling or threatening due to the challenge to the status quo.

Curiosity can overcome these challenges. Being curious has been shown to reduce rigidity, biases, and resistance to change, and to increase:

• resilient relationships,
• the ability to engage in creative conflict (rather than destructive conflict) resulting in more relevant and creative outcomes,
• the development of knowledge, skills, and competencies,
• understanding,
• tolerance for ambiguity.
• creativity,
• positive physiological responses, including positive emotions,
• motivation and a sense of self-determination,
• ethical behavior and social responsibility,
• satisfaction, and
• self-reinforcing personal and collective performance.

When we develop our ‘curiosity muscle’ (openness and ability to organize random information quickly) we increase our ability and effectiveness to identify and assess options, and decide on a course of action.

Barriers to Curiosity

Despite the essentialness of curiosity to our evolution and success, it is suppressed in many ways, making people unwilling and/or unable to be curious.

Systemic Barriers

Being curious means asking a lot of questions, especially “Why?” However, our systems reward ‘checked boxes’ such as completed exams, completed papers, completed projects, etc. Our systems rarely reward the messy and ongoing understanding process (eg business agility), nor the ability to embrace nuance and subtleties – which are essential to actually creating sustainable change.

Our education systems rarely foster curiosity. Although students show much more curiosity when it is role-modeled for them, and when they are prompted to explore and experiment, research shows students are usually not encouraged or supported to be curious. Therefore students lose their curiosity, and their ability to explore (question and understand) and experiment (challenge, learn, and adopt new perspectives). 

This suppression of curiosity is repeated in business settings where even leaders that value stakeholder engagement will stifle curiosity as they fear it will slow things down and create risk such as conflict. There is a sense that questioning leads to conflict, and conflict should be avoided. Destructive conflict should be avoided, however, creative conflict should be embraced. This is the ability to leverage diverse perspectives to really understand and resolve a situation – is essential to learning, transformation, and growth.

Cognitive Barriers

Another way our abilities and willingness to be curious and creative have been weakened is by the emphasis on explicit and mechanical knowledge in the ‘industrialized education’ model. To increase our abilities and willingness to be curious, we need to develop mapping and body-wisdom competencies.

• Mapping situations helps us develop and update mental frameworks. However, most people are taught to think linearly and mechanically.
• We can leverage the power of our physiology as valuable sources of information. However, many people either suppress physiological responses (such as emotions) and/or are controlled by them (rather than empowered by them).

Physiological Barriers

The inhospitable climate for curiosity means that we often inhibit our own curiosity because we fear people will think we are incompetent, indecisive, unintelligent, disruptive, or not a team-player. We also inhibit our curiosity to protect our status (eg our identities related to our expertise, positional power, group belonging, etc) and/or to protect our sense of well-being.

The focus on false harmony and the gap in competencies undermines one of the key tools of curiosity – questioning – is perceived as a sign of weakness or a threat.

When a threat response is triggered, we have a natural tendency to deny what we’ve seen or heard, in order to try to suppress the conflict between our current mental models and the new, conflicting information. Suppression can be consciously or unconsciously motivated to protect ourselves and our status in our desired social groups. 

If we have the power to do so, we can maintain the status quo, at least for a while. This suppression of relevant questioning, learning, understanding, and reformulating our mental frameworks can result in silencing stakeholder’s willingness and abilities to challenge the status quo in the future, and missing the opportunity to evolve collectively and individually.

When we suppress our curiosity, we become victims of our environment, or we try to dominate rather than figuring out how to thrive in our evolving world. However, this rarely ends well for us individually or for others.

Developing Curiosity

Albert Einstein said, “The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.” Charles Darwin is credited with “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge…” And Isaac Asimov wrote, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not Eureka! (I found it!) but rather, ‘hmm… that’s funny…’”. 

Accepting the Messiness of Curiosity and Understanding

Developing real understanding of (not just ‘knowing’) a situation is an ongoing, messy, collaborative process of exploration and experimentation,

Accepting that in many situations we don’t have an understanding of the situation can feel threatening, especially if we define leadership as having answers. If our need for knowledge is only for external validation, we will not be curious, and we will not enjoy learning.

However, if we accept the messiness of curiosity and understanding, we will also be intrinsically – and sustainably – motivated. We will embrace learning and allow ourselves to be awed.

Even though we often inhibit our curiosity to protect ourselves, research shows that when we are genuinely curious, we are more empathetic, liked more, seen as more competent, trusted more, and we improve the meaningfulness and intimacy of relationships overall.

As leaders and as individuals, we can develop competitive advantage by strengthening our curiosity, and therefore our likelihood of thriving.

Building a Culture of Curiosity

Since curiosity is a combination of openness to new ideas, and the ability and willingness to see patterns, there are cognitive and physiological aspects to curiosity that are influenced by the culture and environment. Developing a culture of curiosity is an iterative process.

To develop curiosity, as leaders we need to structure our teams in a way that balances expertise (existing knowledge and experience) with curiosity (the ability to question, explore, and experiment). A culture of creative conflict is strongest when there is expertise, experience, and depth of knowledge on a team, as well as curiosity, and the collaborative willingness to challenge the status quo, and the desire to explore for new and better ways. Curiosity must be explicitly and implicitly encouraged and rewarded.

What seems to be critical to developing self-perpetuating curiosity is the oscillation between developing competencies (the challenge of learning and transforming), and the application of those competencies (the reward arising from learning and transformation).

Therefore, to provide opportunities, as leaders we can help experienced people by giving them new opportunities to be ‘beginners’ and develop new perspectives. This could include giving them new roles and new situations, and supporting ongoing learning based on interests. This includes ensuring there is/are:

• dedicated time to explore (eg asking why, what if, how, etc),
• collective mapping processes that deepen understanding of the situation, stakeholders, and the ecosystem;
• mechanisms that motivate, foster resilience, and reward engagement with new ideas (to increase thoughtful consideration and to reduce ‘immune responses’);
• resources and rewards connected to performance and outcome metrics, as well as to exploring (understanding) and experimenting (learning) metrics; and
• a healthy culture of creative conflict and psychological safety,

Developing the Competencies of Curiosity

On a personal level, to increase curiosity we need to:

• develop our mindsets so we remain open (eg growth mindset, entrepreneurial mindset, holistic mindset, and collaborative mindset);
• develop our abilities to collaborate and engage in creative conflict;
• develop our mapping abilities and mental frameworks (so we can organize random information quickly) and continue to update those frameworks as conceptual conflicts are noticed;
• develop our body-wisdom to leverage stress and physiological signals, and so we can let go of our biases and blind spots; and
• ask better questions so we can increase understanding.

To minimize the negative impacts of a threat response, we can acknowledge our responses, and become curious. By being curious we transform our physiological threat response into engagement, and increase our ability for greater awareness, better perception, and more comprehensive understanding.

We Need to be Willing to Challenge our Beliefs and Identities

The stronger our beliefs and identities are, the more we will perceive conflicting ideas or challenges to our status quo as threatening. A threat response includes the physiological fight, flight, or freeze responses, which narrows our focus, reduces the functioning of several brain regions, and reduces our ability to identify or take advantage of opportunities.

However, if we are able and willing to challenge our own beliefs and identities, we will be more comfortable with curiosity. There is a virtuous cycle between our physiology and curiosity: the more curious we are, the more constructively we are able to deal with a perception of threat.

We Need to Learn Well

At a cognitive level, we need to be able to organize random information into existing mental models, and we need to be able to adapt our mental models when we find discrepancies.

New information and recognition of gaps in mental frameworks (ie discrepancies) can result in threat responses (and feel like a victim) or we can choose curiosity (adopt a creation or collaboration mindset).

If someone is not a good learner, they will likely be uncomfortable with discrepancies, complexity, and curiosity. However, the people most comfortable with curiosity are the ones who can be comfortable with the discomfort of knowing they need to learn something, knowing they likely need to transform something about themselves, and knowing they are able to do so or they will figure out how to do so.

Conclusion

Curiosity is a process of seeking new information and organizing that information with mental frameworks. As we develop insights, we need to update those frameworks, which results in the need for more information. By developing our curiosity, we increase our ability and effectiveness – individually and collaboratively – to identify and assess options, and decide on a course of action.

There are several systemic and personal barriers to curiosity. However, we can strengthen our and our teams’ curiosity by building a culture of curiosity and developing our competencies of curiosity.

_______________________

How do you foster curiosity? How have you used curiosity to increase innovativeness and transformation?

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You can accelerate breakthrough results by working with someone who can help you navigate the process and improve sustainable performance. I would be pleased to speak with you to explore how I can help you generate your sustainable competitive advantage and create your breakthrough results.

Catarina von Maydell, MBA, works with leaders, individuals, and teams to facilitate sustainable breakthrough performance improvement and growth. She has helped many of her clients achieve record-breaking performance.

This article was originally published on .

Other articles you might be interested in:

Mindsets:

• Entrepreneurial, Growth, Holistic, and Collaborative  Mindsets

Collaborative & Entrepreneurial Competencies:

• Effectuation, Creative Conflict,  Graduated Creative-Conflict, Creating Collaboration, and the Creator-Coach-Challenger Paradigm

Personal Super-Powers:

• Body Wisdom, Mitigating Bias, Curiosity, and Generating Better Solutions

Leading Change and Transformation:

• Project Management Best Practices, Understanding Our Systems, Thinking Beyond Simple Metrics, and Deming’s 4 Factors of Change 
• Business Agility is About Humans, Human Dynamics in Organizations, 3-Levels of Leadership, Motivating Humans, Fostering Collaboration, Leadership and Resilience, and Psychological Safety