An idea for today: Are you fostering a curious culture?

Curiosity; a basic human instinct at the root of advancement. 

Do the most curious people in your organisation sit in the research and development department? Are the designers and big thinkers grouped together where they can concentrate their skills to design products and processes and let everyone else get on with important operational issues to sell those products and services?

The idea

What if everyone in your organisation was curious about just one thing? If the tea lady was curious about what drinks visitors preferred at different times of the day or what tea to serve the visiting analysts from Japan. If the IT support department was curious about the effects of information overload on productivity and what to do about it. If your sales team were curious about how your product truly impacts the lives of your customers. What if your CEO was curious about everything? 

Innovation and creativity are hardly universal skill requirements at most companies. These skills are reserved for those that will use them directly. But what if every person in your company came to work curious about how to do things better, how to use less paper clips or one less page in the customer contract? Imagine the productivity enhancements that would come from this?

In practice

·       An environment of curiosity has to be fostered as part of the corporate culture

·       It’s not something you can talk about and expect people to develop themselves

·       You need to expect curiosity from staff by giving them things to be curious about

·       Be curious yourself and wonder about things

·       Ask your staff to wonder too, and give them time to do so.

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