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Curiosity Foundational Values

What Exactly Happened to the Cat?

🎹 Music for this post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyZf0mKXZr8.

What does your childhood home look like now on Google Street View?

What is the most interesting piece of IMDB trivia for your favorite movie?

On what website can you find the inventor’s original intent for the Ruffles potato chip?

What piece of sports trivia would you share that would stump your friends? (For instance, why is a marathon 26.2 miles?) Are you 100% sure that you’re right about it?

When was the first electric car made? When was the first internal combustion engine car made?

Is your favorite teacher still alive?

How the heck is white pretzel salt actually made?

How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?

Did you care to look into at least one of the above questions before you reached this paragraph?

I implore you to share your most surprising findings on either the LinkedIn or Twitter threads relating to this post.


Now, I can’t tell from here how curious you are. But you can. It’s a pretty safe bet that you are reading this on a device that has access to the Internet, and if you didn’t take the time to look into at least one of the above things, what got in your way? Are you, perhaps, on a schedule to finish reading this page? Or are you, perhaps, light on curiosity?

There are ten foundational values at the root of The Progressive CIO, yet there is only one that is shared by just about all of the hundreds of senior managers I have consulted for or worked with over the years, and that is curiosity. I suppose this means that, despite some of the dysfunction I have witnessed in my professional encounters, there is at least one thread that ties most leaders together.

Why do you suppose that is the case?

To be curious is to be fully invested in one’s personal growth. Why would anyone want to hire a person who wasn’t interested in that? Even if you are hiring someone for a rote task, a non-curious individual would be a bore to work with. Yet, we have all worked with people who lack curiosity. Perhaps it’s hard to smoke out this attribute in a standard interview. One has to be curious about the curiosity of others in order to get to the starting gate. Therein lies the rub! What will you do to nurture this in your own life?

I once knew a vice president named Joe who proudly fathered the most richly rewarding line of manipulative interview questioning that I’ve ever encountered. This is how it went:

Joe: “Do you have any regrets?”

Interviewee: “Hmmm, yes. I wish I had {studied violin; finished college; traveled to Europe}.”

Joe: “Why didn’t you?”

Interviewee: “I didn’t have the time.”

Answers of that last sort occurred more often than Joe would have liked. The crux, for him, was that we all have time to do the things we want to do; we merely make choices about what we do with our time. He was most interested in hiring candidates who understood this.

Now, I have to say, I have shared this story probably a hundred times over the years, and I have gotten into some interesting disagreements. I remember one individual saying, “I have children. I don’t have the choices about what to do with my time that you think I do.” To which I replied, “I appreciate that, but it is still a choice. You are just choosing not to be a miscreant. Plenty of people do make the choice to be a miscreant. You, too, could make the choice to be a miscreant. I want you to realize that it is a choice, albeit one a fine person like you has made with integrity.”

We went on a bit, and I followed up by making the point that, beyond this sort of thing, we (typically) do make choices to have children, and there are consequences to that. These sorts of things are delicate, mind you. But they are healthy to take the time to consider. And, of course, beyond even that delicate point, we are all free to make a choice about whether or not we even live. For what it’s worth, I hope that you, dear reader, continue to make the choice to live!

So, to say that we don’t have time to do something is a lazy way of overlooking some of the tougher choices we have to make.

Curiosity is a choice. Because of that, curiosity will sometimes feel like it is slowing you down (see: Patience). The single most useful curiosity-based tool that I use regularly is the exercise of the “Five whys.” There is no question that it will slow you down, but if you’ve never used it before, give it a try sometime. I am willing to bet that you will continue to find that sort of slowdown to be immeasurably healthy.

Were you aware that there are a host of curiosity tests online?

(You’d be correct in thinking that I hoped you searched for that before I mentioned it.)

Take — no, make — the time to take some of these test. Curiosity is a choice. More pertinently, I suggest that you make the time to look for it in others.

Carve out the time to look into the things you need in order to grow, and you will grow. Plodding forward without a care in the world about what else might be possible is not a terribly strategic way of getting things done. If you do not value curiosity in yourself, it will be difficult to nurture that in your teams.

Should you encounter someone who argues: “But curiosity killed the cat!,” simply smile and offer: “If the cat steadfastly practiced the alternative, there would be no kittens to follow.”

Discuss this specific post on Twitter or LinkedIn.

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