#FitForVUCA: Learning and Curiosity

Teams who learn together, perform well together, that’s plain to see for anyone who has studied highly performant teams, but with the concept of continuous learning being relatively new and contrasting our previous attitude towards the conclusion of education at the end of our school years, the ways in which we are curious and collectively acquiring new insight and skill in the workplace is a complex topic. 

We wrote about this many times before:

“A lack of curiosity will kill the corporate Cheshire cat”

“Get kitted for the right kind of failure”

“The Psychological Safety net”

“Learning is not a luxury”

We spend a lot of time at PeopleNotTech thinking of the role of having a solid appetite for learning in our new VUCA reality in the context of Psychological Safe (and therefore highly performant) teams. 

“Is it safe to fail?”

“Is it safe/encouraged to learn?”.

“Can you have Psychologically Safe teams in the absence of failure and learning?” 

And if we can all agree it’s desirable, “How do we inbuilt curiosity in the DNA of a company’s culture?”

“How can we ensure the top keeps learning as well?” 

“Does Impression Management not directly disallow us from effective learning?”

“What is the relationship between curiosity and courage? What about learning and vulnerability?”

“Are teams who learn together exhibiting higher degrees of engagement and are they more resilient?”

“Do all types of learning count equally toward building Psychological Safety?”

“If the emphasis on curiosity outweighed the fear of failure, wouldn’t that breed a much-needed culture of experimentation and innovation?”

Those are just some of the questions we have asked ourselves when we decided to measure learning appetite in our software as one of the components that indicates the level of Psychological Safety a team has. 

In this video we touch on some of these topics and invite you to think of the matter yourself - what can you observe around you and within yourself? Are you more or less thirsty for knowledge than you were in other jobs and with other teams? Do you feel like your team learns together and shares efficiently? Do you gain from interacting with them around new information, shared experiences and acquired knowledge? 

Depending on the type of industry and job you are in, the necessary pace of learning can vary (and aside from information, there is also the more pressing matter of the steep learning curve we are all faced with in increasing our EQ fast enough to remain competitive in our new workplace realities) but there is no argument for believing it will slow down in our VUCA world so let’s get curious about learning or learn more about curiosity and watch the exploration make our teams feel more Psychologically Safe.