• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, March 13, 2024

I’ve written time and time again that you must be able to “do” things and not simply manage those things to be done.   Of course, in order to be successful at doing things, you must be curious, and curiosity is a discipline.

Like any discipline, curiosity must be practiced. You find ways to work it into your day.   Think of it like playing a musical instrument.  You practice 15 minutes a day (or more) to be proficient.  Curiosity is the same.   You are consistently engaging with new ideas and asking question.  When you practice being curious, you uncover things that can make you successful in all aspects of your life.

After spending a few days at SXSW this week, I found myself analyzing the difference between personal and corporate curiosity.  SXSW is crawling with people who are curious, and each of them are satisfying their curiosity by interacting with like-minded people. 

Corporations profess to be curious, and in many cases, they establish innovation groups and special-project teams to check off a box that meets a curiosity edict made by their senior management.

These approaches are different.  One is natural, while the other is forced.  One is personality driven, while the other is KPI-driven.  One works -- and the other one is doomed to not work.

Corporations need to establish curiosity at a cultural rather than at a departmental level. Curiosity fuels innovation rather than innovation being fueled by a KPI to meet with a certain number of companies in a predetermined amount of time.

Curiosity comes from approaching challenges with a new idea rather than solely having start-up competitions where you award the “winner” access and a few meetings, but never truly follow up and generate activity.

The challenge lies in curiosity becoming activated properly.  It has to be genuine, and to do that you need to hire people who are curious.  Curiosity is a trait you can find in people during an interview process simply by asking.  You can ask them what they are curious about, or you can ask them to identify something they learned as a result of being curious.

What do you do to make curiosity a cultural element of your business?   I would suggest incentivizing people to allocate a portion of their time toward being curious or looking for new ideas.  They should be searching for things that interest them naturally, and finding ways to connect the dots and apply what they learned to the working environment.  Doing so creates a habit, and that habit can manifest in many ways that will benefit your company in the long run.

So find ways to foster creativity in your workplace and you can expect to reap the rewards. Do so at a cultural level, and those rewards can become tangible much faster.