Curiosity Unleashed: Achieving Business Excellence by Challenging the Status Quo

PART I

WHAT WE

KNOW

PROLOGUE

Curiosity books are much like emotional intelligence books: those who need them likely won’t read them. So let me commend you for being curious enough to read this one!

This book takes up where my previous book, Cracking the Curiosity Code (2019), left off; it dives deeper into the value of curiosity and includes examples of individuals and organizations who have benefitted financially from developing curiosity as well as examples of those who have failed by not doing so. Most importantly, it explains how to overcome the barriers that inhibit curiosity.

Additionally, this book shares with you what I have taught to the thousands who have taken my training courses and attended my presentations. I hope that as you read Curiosity Unleashed, you too will realize the value of curiosity and how its definition can vary, and also come to appreciate its key role in both organizational and individual development.

I have divided this book into multiple sections so that readers can easily access whatever topic interests them most. Section one opens the book with insights into curiosity gleaned from some of the incredible guests I have interviewed on my long-running radio program, Take the Lead.

The second section addresses the financial benefits that come from fostering curiosity. Leaders might find this the most critical section to read because it explores how low curiosity often correlates with various challenges that organizations face. Curiosity is the driving force behind innovation, engagement, communication, motivation, and overall productivity.

The third section presents examples of successful organizations that embraced curiosity and embedded it in their core cultural values. It also highlights the financial rewards these organizations have reaped.

The fourth section delves into intriguing products and instances that have sparked curiosity in the natural world or within organizations. It features stories of notable companies that have embraced curiosity and created world-class products as a result.

The fifth section explores the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the future of curiosity and addresses AI’s potential benefits and risks. This section also discusses issues related to job security and artificial curiosity and their implications.

Although this book primarily focuses on developing curiosity at work, section six delves into how curiosity can affect personal considerations such as passion, life alignment, experiential balance, and individual growth.

Section seven showcases the stories of well-known individuals globally recognized for their inquisitive nature and discusses how they leveraged curiosity to succeed.

Section eight shares examples of organizations that clung to the status quo—much to their detriment.

Section nine provides key insights for those seeking to enhance curiosity within themselves or their organization. It shares findings on inhibiting factors and introduces the Curiosity Code Index (CCI), the first assessment to identify four factors that can impede curiosity: fear, assumptions, technology, and environment (FATE).

The final section empowers readers to take actionable steps and offers concrete suggestions on how to use curiosity to unlock both personal and organizational success.

Let the exploration begin!

Diane

INTRODUCTION

When it comes to curiosity, the foreword to Cracking the Curiosity Code holds a special place for me, having been written by my friend Keith Krach, the former Chairman and CEO of DocuSign and former Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment. Krach, the embodiment of curiosity in action, set the tone for that book.

When I interviewed Keith and thousands of other notable leaders for my nationally-syndicated radio show and podcast, I found curiosity to be a recurring theme—even though I hadn’t intended to make it the central topic of the show. As these guests have provided me with some of my most insightful lessons on curiosity, I transcribed those interviews, preserving their conversational flow, and have placed the resulting nuggets at the beginning of this book. I hope they pique your interest in curiosity and entice you to read the rest of the book. Most of all, I hope that you find their insights as inspiring as I have!

* * *

DANIEL GOLEMAN,

psychologist and author of Emotional Intelligence

I asked Daniel: So, have you always been a curious person?

Daniel’s Response: Curiosity is one reason I left psychology and went into journalism. I was at the Times for twelve years, some of it spent in the science department. In journalism, whatever catches your fancy and might be of interest to other people, you can pursue. I found psychology departments weren’t that open, frankly. There are two strategies that companies and people generally use in life. One is exploit and the other is explore. Psychology departments, at least in my experience, wanted me to exploit. They wanted me to refine a topic that I could spin around and add something to. It’s a bit like a company that has a product that makes money that they tweak every year so that it keeps bringing in the cash. To explore, on the other hand, means to be curious, to look around, and to find something new. Schopenhauer said, Genius is hitting the target others do not see. Steve Jobs was fantastic at that. He may not have been so great in other ways, but that was one strength that he had. And it showed in Apple. I found in journalism that you could explore widely. I never thought about that before, but now that you pointed it out, I can see that I was curious.

I can see why you’ve developed a measure of curiosity. You’re very curious. I remember an article in the Harvard Business Review by Claudio Fernández-Aráoz saying that curiosity is one of the key competencies in the future. You’re ahead of the game.

* * *

TOM PETERS,

author of In Search of Excellence

I asked Tom: Where does curiosity fall on your list of important traits?

Tom’s Response: Curiosity to me is about people who are interested in everything. Because to me, curiosity is horizontal, not vertical. Horizontal—and I was tweeting about this—is one of the reasons I have been in a tech firm and have 23 code writers working for me. I want one theater major, I want one music major, I want one philosophy major, and I want somebody who is as bright as the dickens but for family reasons never did make it through formal schooling.

I read an exchange on Twitter where somebody related how they knew a guy who had worked for the CIA as part of a sophisticated operation. The guy who had worked for the CIA said that when he put teams together, he always looked for somebody who had a musical background because she or he would come at the problem differently. That to me is the essence of curiosity; somebody who is thinking about Bach while you’re thinking about third derivative calculus equations.

I said another thing that relates to all of this, and it also has to do with what curiosity is (and this may change in a few years), and it is that there are no experts. You have to experiment. You have to figure it out for yourself. As with any new product, you’re going to make 173 mistakes before you get a ritual that works. I know there will be 257.6 books about how to work from home within a few years, but now there aren’t, and we need to play with it. Acknowledge to your teammates that you’re playing with it. Say to them, This Zoom thing is new to me. I have no idea in the world what we’re doing. I have no other idea whether this is going to be a bust or genius, but we’ll all try.

I have to tell you another tiny story that I read on Twitter, which is relevant to our conversation. When I read it, I almost got ill because I laughed so hard. Let’s say that I’m a salesperson, male, you are a customer, female. I want to learn more about your needs, so I ask you questions. I ask you four questions, and you reply each time, but in the middle of your reply I always interrupt you. I ask a fifth question, but you just sit there and don’t say anything. Finally, I say, Aren’t you going to answer? and you say, You always answer your own questions anyway, so I thought I’d wait.

* * *

DOUG CONANT,

former President and CEO of the Campbell Soup Company

I asked Doug: How much do you think curiosity ties into improving engagement?

Doug’s Response: It’s huge. I’m going to bridge over into some of Jim Collins’s work with his Level 5 Leadership model. He talked about what to differentiate. He was surprised at some of the lessons he learned when he wrote Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t. When he was writing his book, he expected that many of the leaders would be hard-charging, Jack Welch [the former CEO of GE] types. But the ones he met he had never heard of. He said, What’s going on here? As he did the work and he did his Level 5 Leadership model, he said, There are two distinguishing characteristics here. One is they have a fierce desire to advance the enterprise. It’s not about themselves; it’s about advancing the enterprise.

The second thing he said is that they have great humility. They’re always curious. They’re always asking questions. They don’t have all the answers, and they know it. They share that with everybody, saying, What do you think? How could we do this better? This goes back to 2000. When I heard Jim talking about it, I was thinking that that makes so much sense to me because in my heart of hearts I had all the answers, but in my heart of hearts, I was a new CEO, and I didn’t have all the answers. I found there was much more power in bringing more humility to the conversation and asking more questions. We placed a premium on curiosity and how we can do things better.

A thousand years ago, when I was at Kraft, I had a boss who had this line. I didn’t understand it at the time, but I do now—I’m a little slow. He would say, Doug, better is always best. His point was to focus on continuous improvement and constantly try to do better. We could become paralyzed while pursuing being the best. Let’s do a little better now than we did before. Continuous improvement is the way of the world because large organizations can’t make giant changes on a dime. It’s all a continuous improvement process. The only way continuous improvement works is if there is unlimited curiosity in the environment.

I asked Doug: Even if you’re a curious person as a leader, how do you get your employees to be more curious?

Doug’s Response: This is my personal philosophy. I talk about my leadership model, the heart of which is honor people and inspire trust. I find that high-trust cultures create high-curiosity cultures. I’ve read all the books on fear, including Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company. I’ve been in a lot of fear-based cultures and paranoid cultures, and I don’t find them to have an endless supply of curiosity. Fear and intimidation is a slippery slope. You may create a breakthrough every once in a while because people are so paranoid that they come up with a breakthrough idea. But in the fullness of time, the way you create a curious culture is to create a high-trust culture where people can feel safe even when they are vulnerable. Because if you feel vulnerable, you can’t create a high-curiosity culture.

I go back to the notion that all roads lead to trust. Stephen M.R. Covey wrote a book, The Speed of Trust, and he gave it the best subtitle of all time. He said, It’s the one thing that changes everything. If I’m on a high-trust team, I don’t care how dire the situation is. I know that we’re going to find a way to get through it. If I’m on a low-trust team, I know we’re not going anywhere. I buy the notion that when you create a high-trust culture your odds of having a more innovative and more curious culture go up exponentially. That’s the path I traveled to get to curiosity.

* * *

AMY EDMONDSON,

Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School

I asked Amy: If leaders don’t recognize that they’re not going to be innovative unless they let people ask questions and provide content, what is the best way to get leaders to help others to speak their minds?

Amy’s Response: It starts with helping leaders to recognize to be mindful of what we’re up against. Many managers have a taken-for-granted mental model. I don’t think very much about it. It’s just my mental model, but there’s work to be done, and people won’t do it unless they’re motivated to do it. They should be a little bit afraid of what will happen if they don’t do it. It’s like, What do I need to do to get people to work hard? is the question they’re asking, rather than What do I need to do to get people to work smart and thoughtfully? How do I help people bring their great ideas and their full selves to work? How do I foster ingenuity, creativity, learning, innovation? Those things do not happen in a fear-based culture. They simply don’t. Neuroscience research has shown us that when people are afraid, they have fewer cognitive resources available for such things as short-term memory and creativity.

We know that fear doesn’t help us do what we have to do, but we forget this. Managers forget to take that seriously and think, What’s the nature of the work we’re going to do? How do I have to show up to help people do that well? It starts with reminding themselves of the VUCA [volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity] world that we live in. We need people asking questions and offering ideas and acknowledging failures rather than just buckling down and working hard because that won’t get you anywhere. It starts with them recognizing the nature of the work and then being willing to remind other people of the nature of the work. They must make the logical case for the voice for why their input is both needed and expected.

Silence doesn’t announce itself. You don’t know when people are holding back because there’s no thought bubble above their head that you can see. What does that mean? What are the implications of that? To learn what people hold back, we must ask questions. There is power in good questions. You’re constantly reminding yourself that your job is to be curious, and if your job is to be curious, then you had better ask questions. You better ask good questions, meaning the kind of questions that you genuinely know you don’t have answers for. The kind of questions that help people focus thoughtfully on a particular situation or issue. They’re not questions like, What’s on your mind? They’re questions like, What do you think about this project? What are the risks here with this topic? Are they focusing on us enough? They’re not yes or no questions. They’re not overly narrow. They don’t give us a multiple-choice response. A good question helps us focus and gives us room to respond. A good question expresses curiosity, and it also engenders curiosity in others.

* * *

ALBERT BANDURA,

one of the world’s most influential social psychologists.

I asked Albert: Do you think curiosity comes before or after motivation?

Albert Response: Curiosity would be a source of motivation. To get curious, you better start examining a lot of things.

I asked Albert: It sounds like your mother had a big impact on your curiosity and your sense of needing to have an education; would you agree?

Albert’s Response: That was interesting because in this small town, about 90% of the male youngsters became farmers. The principal of the school called my parents in, and she said, I gave your son this test called the IQ test. I don’t think Albert should be a farmer. I think he should go to college. My parents said, We don’t have any money. She said, You will find the money, but you have to make the decision that he isn’t going to be a farmer and that he should go to college. That was another impetus. My parents didn’t have any education, but they’ve put a tremendous emphasis on self-development through education. I also acknowledge the value of curiosity because it is what led me to do my research at Stanford.

* * *

ROBERT CIALDINI,

professor and author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

I asked Robert: In my research, I found that environment has a big influence on your curiosity; would you agree?

Robert’s Response: That’s a great insight. My clients will sometimes ask, What should I be looking for? What’s the one trait I should be looking for in a salesperson? My answer is empathy, somebody who doesn’t judge what is the most appropriate or likely effective approach in this situation by self-reflection or looking inside themselves but by empathizing with the market. Who are the people that you’re speaking to? What are they likely to resonate with? What are they most likely to find congruent with the way they like to make their choices? Empathy is that ability to get out of yourself, put yourself into their shoes, into the head of the people that you’re trying to influence that makes you the superior persuasive communicator.

I asked Robert: Do you need curiosity to build empathy so that you know which questions to ask to get there?

Robert’s