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My research focuses on what keeps people from being curious. What I really thought was fascinating was there is a lot of research out there that’ll tell you if you’re curious or not, but then what if you’re not? I wanted to fix that. For example, my students didn’t seem to embrace a high level of curiosity at times. They kind of wanted me to just tell them how to do something without trying to figure it out.
I found that there are four factors that keep people from being curious. I came up with the acronym, F.A.T.E. It stands for fear, assumptions, technology and environment.
When we think about F.A.T.E in organisations, it opens up discussions that no one really has had at work before. This is tied into how engaged people feel with their job. They’re not doing things that they feel passionate about.
I’ve had many guests on my show who are motivation experts and even curiosity experts, and it doesn’t matter who I talk to on the show, everyone will agree that curiosity is the spark.
Go through each of the fear, assumptions, technology and environment as a checklist.
For fear, list some of the things that keep you from asking questions in a meeting. Is it failure, is it embarrassment, is it loss of control? Get specific and come up with little ideas of what you can do the next time. For your assumptions, think about what it is that is making you disinterested or apathetic or finding something unnecessary? What keeps you from exploring new things? Thinking about technology, do you over or under utilise it? Is it because it is just too much trouble? You’ve not been trained? Are you overwhelmed? And lastly, for environment, think of how your education; teachers, family, friends, workers, peers have had an impact on you exploring curiously. If you write those down, anytime you have an answer to some of these things, then you can create an action plan, ‘Well, here’s what I’m going to do today to overcome that!’
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Vas
When I reflect back, I think the one thing that had become clear to me over the years is that the most powerful asset that a corporation or an organisation has ultimately is people. If you believe that as a starting point and you believe in the positive side of human nature, that if you give people a sense of purpose, a sense of autonomy, a sense that they can be curious and improve themselves, they’ll perform their best.
Vas
When you look at the history of large companies, we go back 100 years and under the world of Frederick Taylor and large-scale manufacturing, we saw that people were treated like cogs in a factory. We kept that way of thinking for probably far too long until relatively recently, and I think now there’s been a resurgence in understanding that with knowledge workers, you need to create an environment that enables them to really be at their best. So that’s what unboss is all about, servant leaders, inspired people, and hopefully an environment focused on curiosity.
Daniel Pink, in 2009, rekindled an awareness that fundamentally human beings are motivated by purpose, autonomy, and mastery. We thought if those are the motivators, then what is the environment? So purpose relates to inspiration. Autonomy is really around the unbossed mindset. And mastery is really all about curiosity. And if you give people an ability to be curious, they can improve their ultimate mastery and feel fulfilment around that.
I think I was also very influenced by the work of Carol Dweck and her work on how learners, people who have an agile mindset, really can create possibilities for themselves and for organisations. How do you create a learning organisation rather than a knowing organisation, and how powerful that can be for the long-term performance and also the happiness of your people.
Steven
I think we live in a world where the digital solutions that we have around us have addressed the obvious but even the complicated. The obvious has been automated. The complicated, artificial intelligence and machine learning can do a lot there. The real added value of people, of humans is how we thrive in complexity. An interesting thing about complexity is that there’s no obvious answer; there’s no easy right or wrong. Even an expert is less impactful. It is all about exploring possibilities, exploring polarities.
So the strength of curiosity is that you don’t immediately jump to the right answer, but that you kind of say, ‘Hey, interesting. Let me learn more about this. Let me explore this. Let me look at many options before I narrow it down to one solution.’ So it is very enriching, and I think it’s also the foundation of then future innovation and forward thinking.
Vas
Our hope is that it creates an environment where people feel like it’s not only about what you know today, but also this environment of constant learning. What I like to say is, ‘Can you keep learning about those around you and your colleagues, what their thinking is? Learn from the external world, but also learn by looking inward.’ So can you really take this kind of 360-degree approach to learning, to be curious about all three of those different spheres? And in doing so, our hope is that again people will come up with more innovative ideas and have bigger impact.
Now, practically how do we do that? I think providing access to a range of tools. We do a lot of work on self-awareness, that kind of self-curiosity as well. And part of creating this unbossed culture, we want to create this environment where people will get curious when they have somebody disagree with them in a meeting or have a different perspective. I think all of that together hopefully builds this kind of environment of curiosity. These nudges hopefully create this different mindset in the company.
Steven
I think if you have a new strategy as a company, there’s always an important moment to also evaluate whether your supporting strategies are fit for purpose. So what we quickly realised was that, in order to execute on this ambitious plan that we have for Novartis, we had to have a different culture as a company. And when you think about culture, it is a massive organisational change that starts with individual change. So we had to rethink our entire approach to all of our people processes.
Vas has referred to the industrial revolution. It’s interesting that we use the word human resources, it’s almost like a reference to cogs in a big machine. We have rediscovered the value of people. They’re our most important and our most precious asset in this company, and that’s also why we deliberately decided to change the name from human resources to people, and that’s where it started.
Steven
I think it’s very important that culture is not seen purely in the soft skill sets. What we really believe is that if you create the right environment for your people to thrive and to really bring their full selves to work, you will get better decision-making, more integrity, stronger performance, and as a result, a better company reputation.
We needed to validate that, and so we’ve done two things. Externally, we commissioned a piece of work that went through all the culture studies. And what was interesting is that work clearly demonstrated that when you have a fit-for-purpose culture, you link your culture to what it is you want to achieve as a company and you make a sustained, deliberate effort to achieve that – you will get better performance. There was a very strong correlation there.
Internally, we’re doing work to look at our best-performing leaders and our best-performing units, and we’re looking at all the culture data we have there. What we’re already seeing is a very strong correlation.
Vas
Steven’s team have really taken on measurement and how do you measure a culture? And there’s no perfect way to measure, but I think you can get a lot of good markers. We have engagement surveys we pulse quarterly. We have upward feedback on our leaders that is regularly obtained. Then we track that over time, and we see do our interventions make a change? We start to see the numbers really move. The questions are standardised. They link to inspired, curious, unbossed. And it’s been really amazing to see.
One of the things that’s happened along the way is a significant shift in the mindset of our leaders. We have daily sales and daily financial reports, but our people organisation has also made completely transparent this data around engagement and culture. So now the normal course of conversation for leaders at Novartis is not only to talk about their numbers, but also to talk about their culture numbers and that’s been a big shift.
Vas
There’s a few different dimensions to why that initially was a struggle. One, we were a very knowing culture, and when you think about how a company like ours develops, we have experts, a lot of experts in lots of different fields, and they all think, rightfully and understandably, that they know the answers. So it’s all about trying to prove you’re right and that you look good by knowing answers. So shifting that to a curiosity mindset, a learning mindset, where you’re constantly looking for new ideas, challenging your ideas, integrating your new ideas into your current way of looking at the world required one shift.
Second, when you look at how we approached learning inside of Novartis, it was primarily around standard operating procedures and compliance training. It wasn’t really about exploring and opening up your mind to new possibilities, even to things far afield from Novartis. So making that shift into learning was also a critical step.
And then the third thing was the behaviour of managers. Managers valued knowers and always knew the answers in meetings. And I see a demonstrable shift to people asking open-ended questions. So now fast forward a few years later. We’re making great progress on the curiosity front, but it took shifts in all three of those areas.
Steven
It has many aspects. Of course, you need to create the environment and the tools and make them user friendly, so people can learn and find information, but what I would also add is you first need psychological safety. There is something intimidating about curiosity in the sense that you first need to admit that there could be different points of views, there could be different answers, or that you may not have the answer. So how safe is the organisation for people to say, ‘Interesting. I don’t know. Let me look into it’? So is there an expectation that people have the answer, or is there an environment where people say, ‘That’s fascinating. I have no clue. Let’s explore this’? So we have to create that psychological safety.
The second thing it’s about is the questions that you ask. So, personally, I’ve learned to ask different questions. Previously, my questions were definitely always ‘listening to fix’. You have a problem. I need a few points of data from you, so I can solve the problem. I’m practising ‘listening to learn’. And so how you ask questions and how you open rather than narrow the issue is very influential in how you learn and how you also role model curiosity.
Vas
What I find in this role is whenever we make a move to support our people, show that we care about our people’s well-being, how our people grow and expand their horizons, it leads to growth in our company overall across all other performance measures. So if you take that as a starting place, and knowing that a sense of curiosity, learning, and mastery is so important to human motivation, it’s almost a no-brainer to invest wherever you can in providing better learning opportunities for your people.
I think in our organisation what it has immediately sent was a symbol that we care and we want to help people grow and learn. We’ve seen the stats, I think, very impressive in terms of the number of people signing up for courses in a broad range, whether it’s language, whether it’s digital, whether it’s on leadership and being highly engaged to improve themselves, and of course, they’ll bring that better self to the office. But I think that the biggest thing is the signal and sentiment you send. You send a signal that you care. You care about knowledge and learning, and you care about creating this environment of curiosity. So I would tell another leader to just do it.
Steven
I think it’s a combination of things. First of all, the symbol, but also the communication. Simon, you were very creative in bringing the ‘Netflix of learning’ to Novartis, which included the playlist and favourites. The fact that it was transparent to people what Vas’s favourite learning topics were, what my favourite learning topics were, it makes it catchy and appealing to others to join it.
Secondly, I think it’s about making it easy for people. We’ve done a lot of work to make it easier to access learning, to find your content. If people need to spend too long to find something, they’ll give up and they’ll switch to something else. And then I think the learning months and the learning rallies and all of that that we’ve done, again, it’s an invitation for people to join in. We definitely have more work to do.
Vas
Well, I think one of the great joys I have that I’ve realised over the years is to constantly be learning about new things. I’m an avid reader, podcast listener, periodical reader. I find it’s very rewarding in its own right, but it also helps me lead better, see new connections, maybe make a connection that I wouldn’t have otherwise made.
I think role modelling has a huge element. I think people look at leaders, and then leaders have a huge influence with the shadow they cast across the organisation. So I think role modelling is incredibly important. That role modelling is, of course, the behaviour of what do you read and understand and sharing that, but also are you somebody who asks questions or make statements? Are you somebody who values knowing or values understanding and exploring?
Steven
As long as I’ve known Vas, he comes with curiosity. For me, I am embarrassed to say I had to relearn it because a job is so demanding and so consuming that it was tempting for me, after a long day of work, to kind of switch off, do a workout, spend some time with my kids, and just read an easy novel. I had to rediscover learning and overcome that initial barrier of it’s hard to learn.
Now that I’m into it, it’s addictive. Now I’m kind of thinking like, ‘Wow!’ Every time I learn something, a new door opens up and new possibilities emerge. I think our Western Europe education system, school system, has sometimes made curiosity difficult because you were supposed to always know the answer. It was always a test about right and wrong. So we need to make learning and curiosity attractive again, and that’s what we’re trying to achieve.
Steven
Over the last few years, in addition to the culture change towards inspired, curious, and unbossed, we’ve definitely pushed the digital agenda. Now, what we’ve seen is we’re able to predict sales through algorithms with a very high level of accuracy, but in the current pandemic, it’s useless because all the algorithms take into account historic trends and analogues, and there is no analogue for the current situation. This is where curiosity, this is where the human brain is the only solution of, hey, this is new; let’s explore what’s possible. So I think the two go very well hand in hand.
Vas
When you look at the way digital technologies make, in some ways, very obvious things readily knowable, my children can quickly Google about almost anything. The need for building a learning mindset to learn about more complex topics becomes much more important. One of the things at Novartis we’re employing is something called the Cynefin framework, and that looks at the different ways you can categorise problems as simple, complicated, and complex.
I think in the digital age, the simple and the complicated become more and more automated, and so you’re left with the complex. And the only way you can navigate complexity is to have a mindset of inquiry where you’re constantly asking questions, navigating, understanding there’s not going to be any absolute answers, as we’re learning now in the age of the pandemic.
You have to almost be an explorer, and to explore you have to be very curious. So I think that shift where human beings are being asked more and more to engage in the world of the complex is going to keep nudging people towards being more curious if they want to be successful.
The Curious Advantage is an exploration of the behaviour of curiosity and its central role in the digital age, taking the widest possible exploration of things curious—historical, contemporary, neuro-scientific, anthropological, behavioural and business.
Curiosity has profound implications for organisations, leaders and individuals inhabiting the digital reality. The Curious Advantage provides pragmatic tools and case studies and makes the case for how curiosity is the greatest driver of value in the new digital age. Curiosity is at the heart of the skills required to successfully navigate our digital lives when all futures are uncertain.
The Curious Advantage introduces the 7C’s of Curiosity model—a useful tool for anyone wanting to lead a curious organisation or who wants to challenge themselves to be actively curious.
Get your print or digital copy of The Curious Advantage on Amazon.
Subscribe and listen to The Curious Advantage Podcast.
As a researcher I study the visual domain, what we pick up from the world around us. I think the brain is inherently curious, because it has to pick up information around us. It has to sample the environment. And we sample by a process called attention. We focus our attention on the things that we want to explore, the things that we want to know more about, the things that are relevant to us. The way attention works is that we can only sample a part of the external world at one time, and this forces on us a decision about where to focus. We can all be in the same room, and because we all have different views about the world, we all focus our attention on different things.
If you’re curious about the world around you, you will focus your attention differently, given what you’re curious about. Meaning that the way we sample the world is determined by what we want to pick up from the world around us.
If two people are looking at a painting and you study at where people look, just look at the eye movement patterns, you will see that we sample that painting differently.
Then if you’re quiet and after a period you talk to each other, you’ll immediately notice that both of have picked up on much different information and that will also influence how you interpret the painting. I’ve had lovely experiences with people who know a lot about art telling me and informing me about where to look on a specific painting. I would never have been able to pick up on that information if I had not had that knowledge. Without that knowledge I would not have picked up on that information, and I would have perceived the world differently.
From an evolutionary point of view, we have to pay attention to certain things. If something starts to move abruptly, we will all pay attention to that piece of information. We have to. It’s one aspect of our behaviour that has led us to survive, because someone might cross the road in front of our car, or enter the room, and it might actually constitute a threat. A lot of people complain about this, right? ‘I’m reading, but I’m being distracted all the time.’ But we don’t say, ‘I tried to go to work, but every time I crossed a busy road, I am distracted by all these moving cars!’ It’s the same evolutionary process at work. The brain doesn’t know whether the thing that’s flashing on the screen in your periphery is evolutionarily important, whether it’s actually a threat or it’s completely irrelevant. The brain doesn’t know it. The brain only has one modus. If something flashes, if something’s moving, we should automatically move our attention towards that information.
The good news is you can make this work for you rather than against you. You can instruct yourself to pick up on certain information by giving yourself a specific assignment to focus on. For example, if you enter a room you could instruct yourself to look at architecture of that room, your attention will be guided by the task in hand.
An attentional window is the size of your spotlight. As a spotlight in the theatre, your attentional spotlight can also change in size. When you’re reading something, you have a small attentional spotlight. You’re focusing on the letters, on the individual words. However, when you’re in a new supermarket for the first time and you’re looking for your favourite pack of milk, you have a large spotlight. We’re constantly zooming in and zooming out, given the task that we have. There are some very interesting individual differences between people who are more able to look at a world with a smaller spotlight, and other people who tend to look at the world with a large spotlight. You need both.
What is the difference between attention and concentration? Attention is the filtering process, what are you pick up from the world around you right now? Concentration is sustained attention.
Concentration is like a muscle, you need to train it. Meditation is a very good concentration exercise, it’s like hyper-concentration. It is concentration boiled down to its essence. Focus on something and ignore all the external and internal distractions.
As everyone, I generally believe that I’m right! And so, what I try to do when I’m making a statement, like for instance about climate change, I really try to take one step back and think, ‘What’s the evidence? What’s my evidence? Where do I get this information from?’ I try to be conscious of my own bubble and see if I am perhaps incorrect.
Remember that your perception of the world is limited, but that’s not a problem. It’s actually a solution to a huge problem, because we cannot deal with all the incoming information. But that means that our attention is something that’s very precious. Try to think of your attention as a resource that is very valuable and use it wisely.
The Curious Advantage is an exploration of the behaviour of curiosity and its central role in the digital age, taking the widest possible exploration of things curious—historical, contemporary, neuro-scientific, anthropological, behavioural and business.
Curiosity has profound implications for organisations, leaders and individuals inhabiting the digital reality. The Curious Advantage provides pragmatic tools and case studies and makes the case for how curiosity is the greatest driver of value in the new digital age. Curiosity is at the heart of the skills required to successfully navigate our digital lives when all futures are uncertain.
The Curious Advantage introduces the 7C’s of Curiosity model—a useful tool for anyone wanting to lead a curious organisation or who wants to challenge themselves to be actively curious.
Get your print or digital copy of The Curious Advantage on Amazon.
Subscribe and listen to The Curious Advantage Podcast.
Well, I love the word curiosity. I think it’s one that a lot of people are frightened of really, because curiosity means that you’re willing to move around within your mind and within the world. It’s quite hard to define it, but I would say it’s about delving deeper, it’s not seeing something just at face value. It’s a will to understand something rather than to just know it.
If you allow curiosity to be at the head of what you’re doing, then you’re not going to be fearful because curiosity and fear just simply don’t go together. If you’re frightened to look and see what the deeper meaning is or to look at another way of actually seeing something, then you can’t be curious.
When going into a situation, if you are feeling fearful, you may not even want to go into that place at all, so you might just avoid it and say, ‘I just don’t want to do this today.’ And in a sense, that’s okay. I don’t think I am curious all the time but if I allow the innate energy to flow, I become much more curious.
Many people give advice about bringing up a child. They may say it’s all about routine, it’s about not listening to them scream, otherwise you’re going to indulge that child. But I don’t believe that it is indulgent to listen to that person, I think it’s indulgent for them to say what they want, and for you to just say okay, here it all is, without thinking. Perhaps in a lot of people’s minds, it’s a very fine line. I just don’t think so. I think you can really listen, but you can have very clear boundaries and you can definitely say how you feel and put that in there, it’s not just about listening one-sided. And that’s the whole thing about curiosity, isn’t it, that it’s not a one-sided thing.
And without wishing to ask too many questions of a child, you can actually enable them to be asking questions if you ask the first couple in a very open way. If I asked one of my children about how a note felt, for example, then they might have said, ‘Oh, I’m feeling that Db and it’s really warm and purple and I feel like it’s a cosy blanket!’ I always felt that my children could take me along a journey, so that they’d be teaching me something new about what we were listening to and why, and in that sense, we were all curious together.
I think it’s to do with a lack of judgement. When you’ve got a class of people or an orchestra in front of you, judgment’s a funny thing. You can pick it up from body language with just a look and a nod of the head, and you’ve got to get rid of that completely, so there is space for someone to perhaps say that, ‘Listening to this feels like I’m up in a balloon, or I feel frightened and I don’t really know why.’ And if they can say that and it’s left in the air without judgement, then it can be explored and it can be understood.
Within a classroom setup, I really have to consider where students have been in their day. If necessary, I might take them outside for a second, not in order to judge them and tell them off, but in order to just say that I acknowledge that there is something wrong and that I wonder really whether they can just take a moment to just reflect on the day and to see what’s happened to make this occur.
In essence, I want to try and take away judgement. I also want to express that we are all equal as human beings in a classroom or in a room together. I’m no better than them because I’m older and bigger. But if we’re going to really work together, there needs to be some kind of mutual respect in there and I do always say that I can’t ask them to respect me, but I really would like to keep the communication channels open, so that if they have a difficulty with what I’m saying, that they can say something without the fear of being judged.
My dear dad wrote a scale book, which is a very fine tome. And the way that he’s written it with the fingerings and how they work is quite alternative, there’s no other scale tome quite like it and I love it. Within his teaching, he encouraged scales to be practised in 100 different ways. Start from the top, start from the bottom, do it in this rhythm, do it in that rhythm, play it in different modes. In short, it’s so important to vary what you play to keep up motivation.
I normally teach older students rather than younger, but some of them still do have a parental input, and I tend to talk to parent and child about the process of becoming independent learners, actually for both of them. The ability to learn independently is a really wonderful gift to be able to give to somebody because if they can motivate themselves within their practise to take the next step, then that’s really great. Again, it’s about lack of judgement, it’s about thinking about what you want to do and making your own choices. You might say, in my practice, I know that I want to run this whole section through because it gives me so much satisfaction, even though it’s not accurate. And you might say, I really ought to do these finger exercises because when I do run through this section, I want to make sure that the rhythm is really working for me. So it might be that you say well, okay, I’m going to try and do the thing that I don’t really want to do first, in order to strengthen up my fingers and discipline them a little bit to enjoy playing through the section more!
But then you might find that you’re really bored and you don’t want to do anything, and at that moment, I really do advocate that to keep up motivation, you have to do exactly the opposite of what you’re telling yourself to do. You put down the instrument and you shake out a bit, you walk to another room, you drink some water, you use your voice instead of thinking about expressing on an instrument.
And suddenly, you will get the energy. And it might mean that 20 minutes later, having had a frolic around with all sorts of pieces and ideas and things, that that person says, do you know something? I don’t mind having a go at those scales now. This is the curious reset.
It’s about overcoming fear, being open, understanding rather than knowing, understanding the boundaries and safety and how you move forward with energy. Also the curious reset, this idea that if you are locked or bored or can’t figure it out or don’t know, try and come at it from multiple perspectives, multi-dimensionality.
One more tip. Maybe get rid of the word ‘try’ and use ‘allow’ instead. Hold curiosity gently in your arms rather than trying to grasp it.
The Curious Advantage is an exploration of the behaviour of curiosity and its central role in the digital age, taking the widest possible exploration of things curious—historical, contemporary, neuro-scientific, anthropological, behavioural and business.
Curiosity has profound implications for organisations, leaders and individuals inhabiting the digital reality. The Curious Advantage provides pragmatic tools and case studies and makes the case for how curiosity is the greatest driver of value in the new digital age. Curiosity is at the heart of the skills required to successfully navigate our digital lives when all futures are uncertain.
The Curious Advantage introduces the 7C’s of Curiosity model—a useful tool for anyone wanting to lead a curious organisation or who wants to challenge themselves to be actively curious.
Get your print or digital copy of The Curious Advantage on Amazon.
Subscribe and listen to The Curious Advantage Podcast.
David
Like most journalists, I started off for many years doing news and along the way I was doing investigations. I’ve probably reported in nearly 100 countries. I’ve done investigations of a massive range of topics. I think often investigations spring from a news story that you’ve done and often it comes from a hunch or a feeling that there’s more to this. I think what drew me to it was that after a while you just want to get into things a little bit deeper. Then there is also that drive to expose and to reveal wrongdoing, which is the kind of area of investigative journalism that I’m involved in. You need a huge amount of curiosity. You need to want to know. You need that desire, that thirst, to find out and get behind stories that are often covered quite superficially in the news.
Sara
I started off in natural history documentaries and then moved into anthropology programmes like the Bruce Parry documentaries. As I got older, the subject-matter got more serious. I moved into current affairs and programmes like Newsnight, Panorama and Dispatches. I’m currently at Channel 4 News.
In this work, I think you have to be very curious and want to expose things. I think for me, once I start to get an inclination that something’s wrong or not going as it should be going, you have to be sort of obsessed, really obsessive, to uncover things. Some people just aren’t that interested in things except for what’s going on within their own lives, and some people really are curious about what’s going on in the world.
David
My work has certainly broadened my perspective. I’ve covered stories from all over the world. I also run occasional training courses for journalists in developing countries including Sudan, Algeria, Morocco, Syria and Lebanon. And that’s really helped me, I think, because it really helps you get inside the mentality of a country and its people.
Sara
In terms of process, usually what happens is either I’ll pitch a story about something I’m curious about or I will be approached by the commissioner or an editor. Then it usually starts off with getting access. It’s all about making connections with people and speaking to them—ideally meeting them face-to-face. I think my process is really trying to understand what that person would want out of this and why they should want to expose something, so that they want to tell their story.
One of my objectives has always been about holding those in power accountable and trying to expose the truth to get to the bottom of whatever the issue is. For example, with Grenfell, my main motivation was to give the survivors, who had gone through the most horrific tragedy, a voice.
David
There are lots of principles of journalism that relate to being curious. You’ve got to be dogged, determined, you’ve got to be forensic, curious, sceptical, asking questions all the time. It’s about testing your own thoughts, testing your own evidence. Does it stand up? Is it really watertight or is this a bit flaky?
David
I would say try to stay open-minded and challenge your own views, but embrace people, don’t push them away. I’ve found that all over the world if you do that, you embrace people, they embrace you back most of the time and you learn from that. I remember in the war in Afghanistan, the refugees everywhere, people suffering everywhere. I remember this poor family lived in a mud hut and they invited us in to share the last of their food. It’s acts of kindness like that that blow away your prejudice and your ideas about certain groups of people, certain types of people. I would say, yes, stay open-minded. Be receptive to other people’s views and challenge your own views. I think in the end you end up with a broader perspective.
Sara
I think in my work it is really important to listen to people and engage. Try to understand their story and what they’re about and put yourself in their shoes. I think empathy and just communicating and being open-minded are really important and enriching.
The Curious Advantage is an exploration of the behaviour of curiosity and its central role in the digital age, taking the widest possible exploration of things curious—historical, contemporary, neuro-scientific, anthropological, behavioural and business.
Curiosity has profound implications for organisations, leaders and individuals inhabiting the digital reality. The Curious Advantage provides pragmatic tools and case studies and makes the case for how curiosity is the greatest driver of value in the new digital age. Curiosity is at the heart of the skills required to successfully navigate our digital lives when all futures are uncertain.
The Curious Advantage introduces the 7C’s of Curiosity model—a useful tool for anyone wanting to lead a curious organisation or who wants to challenge themselves to be actively curious.
Get your print or digital copy of The Curious Advantage on Amazon.
Subscribe and listen to The Curious Advantage Podcast.
How can leaders create a culture of continuous learning and drive the company’s global learning and development strategy and initiatives? What is ‘Learn like an Owner’? What are sacred spaces in our contemporary world? How does the sacred link to curiosity?
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I am interested in how to get communities of people to engage with science. The most important principle is that the citizens need to get an understanding of some basic science and how this connects to their everyday lives. Examples are climate change and its anthropogenic causes, health issues such as vaccination, healthy eating and exercise, the future of technology plus more.
Everybody is born a ‘scientist’ as everybody is born curious. Somehow this is frequently programmed out of us by our environment—our family, our education system and our society in general. A more interactive, empathetic and biomatic way of teaching is needed.
With regards to communicating science it has frequently been done in a wrong way. It is not the lack of information or convincing data that people are missing. For example, An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore has been out since 2007, and it was giving all the facts about the destruction of the climate, and eventually the planet, with all this data and facts. This, instead of convincing, it was scaring people off hence they were just rejecting it. So, the mechanism is to create engaging, fun, educational methods that will not necessarily seem as teaching, but it would feel more like an entertainment if possible.
As an example, we created the first science festival here in Greece, back in 2014, and now we’re running about six of them all around the country. We have around 60,000 visitors collectively every year. When people go to that fair, they don’t necessarily go to learn science, but they go to have fun. Now, learning a little bit of science as a positive consequence, it’s something which comes out of this experience. We use gamification, and by not having a lecture type of approach. This is the main answer. What we do, it’s edutainment, education and entertainment.
The best result comes out when an educational program is ‘phy-gital.’ Both physical and digital.
The collective intelligence of a group increases in very specific ways. One is the way that you allow people to talk and fully express their opinions uninterrupted. Collective intelligence also is meant to increase when there is a higher number of women in the group, because it increases the social perception of the group. In addition, people from different backgrounds increase diversity which is vital for community intelligence.
The Curious Advantage is an exploration of the behaviour of curiosity and its central role in the digital age, taking the widest possible exploration of things curious—historical, contemporary, neuro-scientific, anthropological, behavioural and business.
Curiosity has profound implications for organisations, leaders and individuals inhabiting the digital reality. The Curious Advantage provides pragmatic tools and case studies and makes the case for how curiosity is the greatest driver of value in the new digital age. Curiosity is at the heart of the skills required to successfully navigate our digital lives when all futures are uncertain.
The Curious Advantage introduces the 7C’s of Curiosity model—a useful tool for anyone wanting to lead a curious organisation or who wants to challenge themselves to be actively curious.
Get your print or digital copy of The Curious Advantage on Amazon.
Subscribe and listen to The Curious Advantage Podcast.
I’m a researcher of neuroscience in organizations. I’m a confidence researcher. I study emotional flexibility. I study the brain. Curiosity is a way or a technique to regulate emotions, because if you observe something with curiosity, if you open up and you explore different possibilities, you become less defensive, you can actually accept that there are different possibilities at the end of a process. You go from a tunnel vision to an open mind.
You also have the opportunity to take a pause if you use curiosity. When you take a pause, you can actually make different decisions. So, that’s how I use it in the work and also in the research that we do.
The opposite of curiosity can actually cause you stress because then you think there’s only one possible way, then you likely set yourself up for failure. Often, there’s a judgement coming up, and you think, ‘Well, if I don’t get that done perfectly, then I fail.’ If you use curiosity, you stay open, and you think, ‘Well, I can choose this path. I can explore, and whatever outcome, it’s fine because I can learn from it. Maybe what I initially thought was the best path is not. Maybe there’s a better path.’
I can share an example from my own experience. I used to set myself up for failure in business meetings. Actually, I also talk about my own confidence crisis at a TED Talk a few years ago. My habit was basically that I had to be perfect for a meeting. If I had to meet with senior leadership, I had to prepare perfectly. When I then got in the meeting, I had to have everything, all the answers to all the questions that possibly came up. So, I always felt like the spotlight was on me, and every move I made was seen. Then on top of it, if I was asked a question that I didn’t know, I would completely feel like I failed because I told myself that I hadn’t prepared well enough.
What I started to do in moments that I felt I would get stuck (and freeze), is use curiosity in those moments to observe what was around me and also what problems we were really solving. I would use curiosity for example to see what colours of shirts people were wearing or what was happening in the room. I would connect with what matters most in the moment (which was not me but the problem we were solving). That took the spotlight off me, and actually puts more of my attention in the room. You engage also part of the brain that helps you then down regulate your emotions and your stress.
Curiosity is an emotion regulation technique and also closely related to a tool in our book called reframing. You engage your executive thinking part of your brain, so that the part of your brain that helps you stay in control, but also helps you stay present and helps you to think calmly, and being in control of the situation, and logically, explore what’s going on in the moment. If you explore more options and allow these options to be there, you feel safer, when you feel safer, your stress levels go down.
True confidence or authentic confidence is all about becoming comfortable with discomfort. Connecting with what’s really important to you, and then taking clear decisions, taking conscious decisions that you want to move towards what is important to you. The authenticity is all about being okay with being uncomfortable in the moment.
An important principle is self-authoring and co-authoring with others. Central to using curiosity is postponing your own judgements and postponing your own way of looking at the world and thinking there’s only one way that is right. The beauty of collaborating with so many other people and teams and organisations is that there’s a lot of rich information and rich insights that can be leveraged. Using the curiosity to see what is really happening in the moment and say, ‘That’s interesting, let’s explore this a bit further. Let’s postpone judgement and let’s create the space to see what happens.’ That’s when the magic can happen.
At the individual level, of course, you need to allow yourself the curiosity to not know the answer. If we want this to happen, then we also need to give people the space to make mistakes, and sometimes go down a rabbit hole and actually encourage that it is better to make a few mistakes and never get through the answer at all. It has everything to do with creating safety for people. That’s at the core of neuroscience as well. I won’t go into technical detail, but there’s a well-known concept called Polyvagal theory (which explains the central role of the Vagus nerve) that talks about the importance of feeling safe for well-being and performance. Till recently it has not been applied to organisations yet, but I started to introduce this more broadly in my work. Safety is very important for this to work. The moment you don’t feel safe, your brain and body lock down, and curiosity is not so easy anymore. Curiosity, however, can be a technique to avoid total lockdown and contribute to staying calm and feeling safe.
The big eye opener for me in my work, which is at the core of all of the practises we describe in our book, is about openness. An important part of openness is ‘acceptance,’ it’s almost about how you can go with whatever life gives you and how can you let it be and find a way to accept that.
Another big eye opener for me was about facing difficult situations. We have this saying in Dutch which roughly translates as ‘the soup is never eaten as hot as it is served.’ It means when you face difficult things, actually, it’s never as challenging as you thought it would be.
Curiosity is at the heart of emotion regulation and acceptance and commitment training, which at its turn has been shown to actually lead to better well-being and performance.
Often our first response to something that makes us feel discomfort is to want the pain or discomfort to go away. That’s just how we deal with it. It’s an understandable reaction. We just ignore it, or we keep stressing about it.
However, by being authentic and curious about it, we can learn to embrace it. This will help us to reduce the pain or discomfort and it will help us to continue to live our life and focus on the things that truly matter. It can be magic if you’re authentically interested in it.
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The Curious Advantage is an exploration of the behaviour of curiosity and its central role in the digital age, taking the widest possible exploration of things curious—historical, contemporary, neuro-scientific, anthropological, behavioural and business.
Curiosity has profound implications for organisations, leaders and individuals inhabiting the digital reality. The Curious Advantage provides pragmatic tools and case studies and makes the case for how curiosity is the greatest driver of value in the new digital age. Curiosity is at the heart of the skills required to successfully navigate our digital lives when all futures are uncertain.
The Curious Advantage introduces the 7C’s of Curiosity model—a useful tool for anyone wanting to lead a curious organisation or who wants to challenge themselves to be actively curious.
Get your print or digital copy of The Curious Advantage on Amazon.
Subscribe and listen to The Curious Advantage Podcast.