Curiosity re-engineering at work @ Cognizant

Why is curiosity re-engineering necessary or is it at all necessary?

 That’s an important question for organizations to ask.

 If you’ve read a couple of my earlier posts, you have probably noticed that I am a proponent of curiosity. I am passionate about curiosity not because it sounds nice but because of a deeper conviction that curiosity is the basis of a company’s deeper competitiveness.

 Following are the reasons for my belief:

 1. The future is unpredictable and cannot be solved by knowledge and tricks of the past

 Most companies have arrived at some kind of ‘formula’ when it comes to solving present-day challenges― they tend to look at what worked in the past and apply the knowledge to solve things in the present. While this approach worked to a certain degree till now, we are seeing diminishing returns of this model. Given the novelty, scale and complexity of new challenges, the traditional approach to problem solving and decision making is eroding.

 All these point to one thing: A new approach of ‘problem finding’ (vs. ‘problem solving‘) needs to emerge to help us face challenges of the future. This obviously requires all of us to nurture a different mind-set and an organization’s L&D team has a crucial role to play in spearheading this. So, on top of training on technical and functional skills, the L&D team also needs to prepare people for new, corresponding and different mind-set of doing business. This need to create the habit of curiosity is accelerated by the advent of AI. The better companies can do this, the more competitive and innovative they will be.

2. Curiosity is the ‘muscle’ to propel learning

At the end of the 19th century, the philosopher and psychologist William James (1899) called curiosity “the impulse towards better cognition,” meaning that it is the desire to understand what you know that you do not. Since then, ample evidence has been put forth in psychology and neuroscience to establish a clear link between curiosity, information seeking and learning. All of us who have seen young children or young animals in action actually have observed this truth ourselves.

At a neurological level, researches are finding increasing number of proof-points for linking curiosity directly to learning in our brain, e.g. curiosity elicits an anticipation of a reward state, higher activity in the prefrontal cortex and activation in the PCC (posterior cingulate cortex), which is believed to link to rewards and the regulation of learning.

All this points to a basic reality: the better we develop our ‘curiosity muscle’, the better is our capacity and capability for learning and our motivation to seek information to improve ourselves and to encode/retain this new information.

3. Not every employee is naturally curious, which may affect employability.

You surely know around you, people who are ‘high energy’ when it comes to reading books, being active in networks, asking questions continually, having the right ambition levels and a growth mind-set and are genuinely interested in the world, others and themselves. These people I call A-players: they are intrinsically motivated with their own learning and growth and are self-sufficient in doing so. These are also the people who will often be more satisfied in life and more successful in their career. I trust you will agree with me that not all employees harbor the same level of curiosity: I call these the B-players. Their ‘curiosity muscle’ is less developed and/or less active because of stress, of a fear of the unknown, satisfaction with the status-quo, limiting beliefs, lack of information about what’s coming, etc. All these prevent them from acting like the A-players. It is these B-players that need nudging to up and cross skill themselves, failing which the organization suffers and the associates themselves erode their own employability.

Given that the A-players are self-sufficient, they will gladly use the services of the L&D departments if it suits them. The bulk of the services of L&D is to equip the B-player colleagues to be good at what they are doing now and prepare them for the future. Now, if the L&D team continues skilling these B-players on tactical knowledge without developing deeper ‘curiosity muscle,’ they will remain B- players. But what if we invite them to change their mind-set and help them evolve into A players? That can only happen when they develop a curious bent of mind that is always on the lookout for more.

 4. Empowering the employee is the (only) way forward.

The technology landscape is changing so fast that it is becoming almost impossible to centralize re-, up- and cross-skilling at an equally energetic pace. Building agile and focused ‘capability academies’ vs. the previous corporate mega-universities can be an important interim step, yet what we really want and need is an environment where the associate is fully empowered, is naturally curious, has access to all the necessary tools to upskill her/himself and is adaptive to the new/ emerging context without the limitation of organizational structures. Research has found that employees with greater curiosity are indeed higher performers.

 This also calls for making sure that all associates are surrounded by a conducive learning culture and climate around them and see the intrinsic value of embracing a mind-set of curiosity aiming at continuous upskilling upheld by the management.

5. Everybody has the capacity to change his/ her habits

For a long time, we have thought that people were born with intelligence and talents (nature). Also, we have believed for a long time that other skills (nurture) were fixed and frozen in formative years till college,  after which people’s capabilities for learning and changing diminished. We all know now that this is wrong; every person has the capability for changing habits and learning new things at any time in their lives. This is called neuroplasticity.

Under the right circumstances, it is possible for people to change themselves. Triggers like having an epiphany, a change of environment (change of job, travel to a new country, etc.) or a gentle meaningful nudge are often enough for people to change. 

About 12 months ago, we embarked on this journey of ‘curiosity re-engineering’ at Cognizant. 

The early results have been positive indeed and are encouraging us to step-up even more.

 What we did: From the very beginning, we were conscious of the need to use the right words and messaging while communicating with associates. In other words, a change in mind-set and behavior is triggered by the use of the right choice of words. For example, an associate needs to hear about ‘growth’ and ‘mind-set’ together to be able to question if what he/ she has got is indeed a growth mind-set or if he/ she is stuck in a fixed mind-set.

 Words are the basis for reflection about ourselves. So if we can change associates’ words and models, they can ponder over the right questions: do I like status quo or am I fine to change for the better?

 In simple terms, we created:

1. A new learning culture and climate framework of Open.Wonder.Learn: This culture change is founded on the principles of associate empowerment around what and how to learn. The approach is facilitated by an open access to learning content, inviting all 300K associates to actively share their expertise, adoption of modern workplace learning framework, an exciting marketing campaign and introduction of new tools and platforms to support video, informal learning, curated content, e-mentoring and more.
2. Sessions on curiosity and learn2learn: The key focus of this initiative is to equip associates with the right language and concepts so that they can analyze themselves and answer simple questions such as: Am I a passive or an active learner? Do I have a growth or a fixed mind-set? What are my cognitive biases? Am I efficient in the way I learn new things? These concepts are delivered through interactive webinars, videos and brain hacks.

 The focus of the curiosity track is to share concepts about growth/ fixed mind-set, flow, etc. as tools for self-reflection and instilling in them a desire to change.

 The focus of the learn2learn track is to introduce associates to practical tips on how they can accelerate their own learning by sharing latest findings in cognitive psychology, that is, how people learn the best. In practical sessions, we equip them with proven models (vs. urban myths), best practices and tips/tricks in terms of how they can accelerate their own learning journeys.

 Until now, we have conducted over 100 sessions where 14000+ associates have participated from 6 continents. These sessions are delivered by internal facilitators. The courses have been translated into Spanish, with work on translations to Portuguese and Mandarin underway. Interestingly, because of their success, we were also invited to do similar sessions for our customers and academic partners.

 Results: In an internal survey conducted three months after such sessions, 46% of respondents said that the sessions had a positive impact on their willingness to try something new and 51% were very interested in being a part of similar sessions in the future. If such feedback is solicited immediately after a session, one can expect such results. However, the fact that even after three whole months about 50% of colleagues still clearly had decided to answer to our invitation to accelerate their curiosity, is hopeful. Interesting also to see is that the average annualized training hours for these associates before and after attending the sessions increased from 25.1 hours to 43 hours.

 Although we have just started on this journey, I feel we are on to something really powerful, something which has the potential to radically change the way we approach learning in our companies. I’d be happy to hear from all of you what you have done in this space and what your experience has been. I am of course also happy to receive feedback on what we can do to improve things.