How to Increase Curiosity

Yves Doz, a professor at INSEAD, one of the world's leading graduate business schools, is an immensely prolific and expansive thinker. Having collaborated over the years with numerous leading scholars, he has studied and written about remarkable leaders and innovators the world over.

In an interview in 2009, Doz provided valuable advice for those looking to develop strategic agility, which he defines as a heightened and accelerated ability to develop innovative solutions that lead to strategic advantage in the marketplace.

First, expose yourself to new external environments outside of your current domain expertise and work groups. Next, become more connected to people and ideas that may positively influence your thinking.

As he described in this tennis analogy: You need to be willing to engage in true dialogues—in other words, to be in a learning mode rather than in a convincing mode. Sometimes managers go into meetings a little bit like a tennis player goes into a tennis game . . . to win the point with the fewest exchanges and in the shortest possible time.

Rather than [thinking] “I want to enlist my colleagues into helping me think about an issue,” instead [I] understand some of their starting points and some of their assumptions and have them understand some of mine. And out of our collective understanding, something better will come out.