Curiouser and Curiouser

I read with great interest a recent article in the Harvard Business Review sent to me by GE Healthcare Account Executive, Jennifer Miller.  In The Business Case for Curiosity, Francesca Gino discusses the benefits to encouraging a “curious” workplace and offers some strategies to help leverage curiosity in driving your business.

As Gino explains, there are several benefits to cultivating curiosity in your organization.

1. Cultivating curiosity at all levels helps leaders and their team members adapt to whatever comes their way. When we are curious, “we tend to think more deeply and rationally about decisions and come up with more creative solutions,” Gino explains.
2. Leaders can drive curiosity—and improve performance—through subtle management shifts and organizational design.
3. Curiosity increases efficiency and helps minimize risk. It helps decrease decision-making errors as it forces us to challenge assumptions as opposed to simply assuming our assumptions
4. It helps contributes to workplace improvements as team members are driven to find creative solutions to challenges facing an organization and become conditioned to seek improvements.
5. Curiosity facilitates better communication and reduces group conflict as team members are better able to see different perspectives and work collaboratively to solve problems.

These all rang true to me, and I try to employ tactics to drive curiosity at TGH from encouraging learning opportunities and modeling curiosity in my own approach to problem-solving, as I have discussed in my most recent blog posts. I also try to encourage team members to ask questions and think about how they can contribute to the overall goals of the organization.

It is fitting that it was Jennifer who sent me this article as our partnership with GE is rooted in curiosity. Today, Tampa General Hospital and GE Healthcare are partnering to create a new 9,000-square-foot care coordination center which will open next year. The center will use predictive analytics to help improve the experience and outcomes for patients, families and hospital staff. The center will allow us to be more efficient and shorten the time patients are in the hospital by better managing their care. This technology will also help to reach our goal of providing coordinated patient care after they leave the hospital.

It is true what they say, that you will never know where the next great idea will come from. We can all listen. We can all ask questions. When you make exploration an integral part of your organization, you will help drive creativity and innovation.