Finding Curiosity

“Tell me the last time you were curious about something.” That’s one of my favorite interview prompts. The follow-up is usually along the lines of: “What did you do to satisfy that curiosity?” I’ve had people talk to me about space exploration, how chickens fertilize their eggs (which I strangely found interesting), and many other random topics, but not everyone had an answer. This got me thinking about the role curiosity plays in business and how to develop it.

I like testing for epistemic or interest curiosity. This is when curiosity is satisfied by joyful exploration. This is different from deprivation curiosity, where information-seeking behavior is motivated by feelings of uncertainty and tension, and can have negative consequences which Zedelius et al discuss in their paper “Inquisitive but not discerning: Deprivation curiosity is associated with excessive openness to inaccurate information”. Their paper discusses the difference much better than I can. It’s a good read and there’s a link at the end of this post for those interested.

Life can get boring if we’re not curious. Many articles online discuss how curiosity can help one avoid burnout, both in work life and daily life. Curiosity nudges us to explore and prompts us to ask the questions “Why?” and ”How?”

Asking ‘Why?’

I work directly or interact with many captains of industry. These leaders share many common traits, and curiosity is one of them. One serial entrepreneur constantly asks why things are done a certain way, then disrupts the framework when he believes there’s a better alternative. A CEO asked why his company’s growth wasn’t higher, so he toured the country, spoke to different offices to get the pulse of his company and get ideas from ground level. Our change management teams constantly ask why decade-old processes were put in place as they seek solutions that are a better fit for the modern competitive landscape.

Asking ‘How?’

“How I Built This with Guy Raz” is a staple in my podcast playlist. In his podcast, Guy interviews founders and discusses how they started their businesses. Asking “How?” has also driven me to seek out business owners and people who are the best in their fields in the Philippines to learn their stories of how they got started. I have been asking these questions throughout my career and it helped me build the strong network of relationships I cherish today.

Curiosity in the workplace

From experience, in a constantly evolving business landscape, companies that foster a culture of curiosity will win. In “The Business Case for Curiosity,” published in the Harvard Business Review, Gino (2018) argues that curious companies are better able to innovate, adapt to change, and solve problems, which in turn leads to better performance against competitors.

FAST Logistics Group has one of the largest logistics networks in the country and one of the strongest service reliability track records. And yet, when it’s time to discuss their service offerings, customers often try to distill all the complexities of supply chain – the delivery schedules, the mode of transport, vendor accreditation, etc. – into one metric: price. And here’s the open secret you might already know: this doesn’t work. It’s like picking up pennies in front of a bulldozer. Customers may end up saving a thousand pesos by going to a cheaper alternative but lose hundreds of thousands in sales if the truck doesn’t show up at its destination. When we encouraged curiosity in our sales team and had them get into deeper conversations with their procurement counterparts, they were better able to grasp their customers’ underlying goals.?Unsurprisingly, these underlying goals are rarely just about the lowest price.

These curiosity-led conversations are helping FAST Logistics Group transition from being an order and price taker to a strategic partner for our clients, creating solutions that efficiently solve their most critical requirements. In Landers Superstore (Southeastasia Retail Inc.) , a membership-based retailer in the Philippines, we foster curiosity in our buyers and encourage them to speak to our members.?These curiosity-led conversations allow us to identify unmet customer needs and continuously improve our curation of products for them.

So much has been written about curiosity in the workplace, and its benefits are straightforward. Yet, in many organizations that I’ve seen (and I have the benefit of access to a large sample size of companies), I wonder, why is this trait not more ingrained in their cultures? And how can we re-discover and nurture it? I think about this often not just to satisfy my own curiosity, but to incorporate the learnings into my own work as an investor and advisor to many entrepreneurs and business leaders. Here’s what I’ve observed:

1.??????Too busy to be curious. There’s too much on everyone’s plates to have time to ask new questions and ponder their answers. Work expands to fill the time allotted for it. If we don’t deliberately create an environment for learning and growth, we can’t expect it to materialize on its own. Lunch-hour learnings and other time-bound training sessions are examples of how we can help employees re-engage and find their sense of curiosity. The best programs I’ve seen involve speakers from other industries who discuss topics not directly related but adjacent to the audience’s work.

2.??????“This has always been the way we’ve done it”. Worst. Answer. Ever. Enough of those types of responses will dull any inquisitive mind. It’s important to keep in check the number of times this phrase is uttered in meetings. We need to break the human tendency of finding comfort in the familiar, because the familiar may be a process created decades ago and no longer relevant today. Break this barrier by going deeper and analyzing the core reason. Repetitively asking ‘Why?’ can help. “Why do we carry out the process in this way?” “Because that’s how we’ve always done it”. “Why have we continued to do it the same way?” “Because that’s what my predecessor / boss taught me to do.” “Why haven’t we explored a more effective alternative?” “Because I have no time / Because it’s somebody else’s role.” This last response is where the real conversation begins. Digging deeper allows you to find people’s motivations.

3.??????Lack of autonomy. When employees don’t make their own decisions and are either micro-managed or need to constantly seek approval from others, they are less likely to come up with their own ideas and use judgment to take initiative. One of Netflix’s valued behaviors is having employees make “wise decisions despite ambiguity.” That cannot happen if there’s a lack of autonomy and curiosity. Netflix views “judgment [as] the solution for almost every ambiguous problem. Not process.” How empowered are your employees to use their own judgment? And how forgiving are you when these judgments lead to mistakes? This brings me to my last observation.

4.??????When failure is punished. Let’s differentiate between catastrophic failures that can lead to ruin (and MUST be avoided) and failures that are recoverable from. In the companies that I work with, we encourage experimentation. As with any scientific process, measured experiments may lead to failures, but it is in these failures that we glean insights. When we fail, we acknowledge the effort, learn from the insights, and move on to the next experiment. When we succeed, we seek ways to double down. By punishing failure, one can stifle innovation. Given the importance of constant innovation in the marketplace, we endeavor to move away from demanding fail-safe environments and toward safe-to-fail thinking. A final aspect to this is sharing constructive instead of negative feedback. In the book “Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High,” authors Patterson et al. note that “When people feel unsafe, they resort to either silence or violence.” Neither helps in fostering curiosity.

I’ve been asked how I keep my own curiosity going. I’m lucky to have had it ingrained in me since I was a kid. When we were young, my parents tasked me and my brother to read an article a day and share with them what we learned at the dinner table. The joy of constantly learning has stuck with me. Today, I find excitement in discovering new things about people, businesses, and ideas. And as I learn more, it naturally sparks more conversations.

This post shares some common hurdles to curiosity I’ve seen but is by no means meant to be exhaustive. I continue to stumble in some of my own experiments to encourage curiosity, but that’s how I figure out what’s best for each company I work with, each with its own idiosyncrasies and needs.

As a leader – of your company, your business unit, or your five-person team – are you creating the right environment for curiosity and inquisitiveness? If you need a sounding board and want to trade ideas, drop me a note ( Brice Cu ).

We are constantly hiring across our portfolio companies in the Philippines. We look out for talent who respectfully challenge the status quo with questions like “Why?” and “How?” These questions can be where change begins, and curious minds help light that fire. If you’re that type of talent, please drop me a note ( Brice Cu ).

What was the last thing you were curious about? And what did you do about it?

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Zedelius, C.M., et al., “Inquisitive but not discerning: Deprivation curiosity is associated with excessive openness to inaccurate information.” Journal of Research in Personality, Vol 98, June 2022. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009265662200040X.

Gino, F. ?“Why Curiosity is Essential for Organizational Success,” Harvard Business Review, October 2018. ?https://hbr.org/2018/09/the-business-case-for-curiosity

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