How to Spark Curiosity in Your Team

Remember the popular proverb, “Curiosity killed the cat”? You’ve probably heard of it while you were growing up, possibly as a cautionary tale, warning you of the dangers of unnecessary investigation or experimentation. And you might have unconsciously brought this belief of yours into the workplace as a leader, paying it forward by not encouraging your employees’ to be curious beyond their job scope.

However, did you know that “curiosity killed the cat” is only one part of the famous proverb? “Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.” is a more contemporary variation that includes the rejoinder “but satisfaction brought it back.”

Although the original version was used to warn of the dangers of unnecessary experimentation, the addition of the rejoinder indicates that the risk would lead to resurrection because of the satisfaction felt after finding out. The resurrection element may be a reference to the “multiple lives” of a cat. This may ironically be what every organisation is striving for in today’s increasingly volatile world where a single economic lifeline may no longer be enough to ensure the organisation’s fiscal longevity.

The Understated Importance of Curiosity

In my opinion, curiosity is one of the most important personal qualities every leader wants their employees to have — a Harvard Business Review study, for example, found that 83% of executives say they encourage curiosity in their employees. This is even more so in the domain that you consider yourself as knowledgeable in, and the only way that you could be the best and could compete with the rest is when you are concerned about learning new things.

Why then, is curiosity so important for your organisation? Curiosity is important for your organisation because it helps your organisation to excel. When you look at a two-year old, one of the traits that they have is the ability to learn from observing. That is why the brain of a five-year old is the most absorbent and your ability to pick up things fast blossoms at an early age.

Hence, if you are operating your organisation as a knowledge workforce, the only way it can propel forward is if it’s in the business to learn. Curiosity instils that important ingredient in the organisation, it injects that shot in the arm for your organisation to continue with the process of learning. Whether it is learning by asking the right questions, learning by looking for answers that are not the status quo, or learning by looking at others and seeing if there are better ways to do the same thing, it all boils down to curiosity.

Introducing the FUEL Framework — Weave the Fabric of Curiosity

How then, can you subtly encourage your employees to embrace curiosity? Let me introduce you to a framework which I apply often: the FUEL framework.

The first step is to weave the fabric of curiosity. To do this, you should build an organisation that is ambidextrous in nature. An ambidextrous organisation has two parts: one has process-driven aspects of control, monitoring and optimisation, and the other part has the more flexible aspects of experimentation, agility and breakthrough thinking. It is very important for you to create harmony by building an ambidextrous organisation, where you are not only doing the right thing within the governance aspect, but also letting your organisation try and experiment new things.

When you weave that fabric of curiosity, you are also bringing the element of outside into your organisation. As business leaders, we tend to not focus enough on what’s happening around us, outside our organisations, and in sectors unrelated to us. Whatever problem it is that you are trying to solve, chances are that somebody else has solved it already.

To any CEO, there are a few key metrics that are important: increasing revenues, reducing costs, mitigating risks and improving customer experience. Oftentimes, you are looking at these four when you are looking at a problem that needs to be solved. Start with the business problem. Then, look at whether that problem has been effectively tackled in a different industry. If so, how was it done and what are the components that they used? The inputs and the objective function you may have to use may be slightly different, but perhaps the overall approach can be replicated.

Every single problem that you are solving for has a likelihood that it has to some extent been solved in other businesses or other sectors and that’s the thinking you should have. Don’t start building things from scratch, see what is already out there, sometimes leveraging solutions from the other industries can be a good thing. There’s also a risk of it deviating you towards the same slippery scope, but at least it brings you a better start than building it from scratch.

Unravel the Thread

The second part of this is unravelling the thread. When you weave the fabric, it’s about creating the organisation where one part of the organisation has that outside in you. But how do you unravel the thread? Unravelling the thread essentially means you set out a vision.

Set audacious goals and activate your vision, which forces the organisation to think beyond the existing set of solutions. I would expect to be able to improve our efficiency by 50% for instance, or any other such audacious goals. We would like to reduce the dependency on A, B, C, and we would like to reduce the turnaround time by 70%.

This may force your organisation to focus on cross-industry benchmarks. In turn, this may force your organisation to focus on mechanisms that are disruptive in nature, and also focus on processes that are completely contradictory to the type of environment. It is important that when you are weaving the fabric, you are also creating a vision which forces your organisation to start thinking in that direction.

Fire the Engine

The third part of this is firing the engine. When you give your employees a big word, vision, it’s important that you give them the necessary tools, the resources and a team to be their supporters. The biggest impediment to somebody with a big idea shouldn’t be a lack of resources, infrastructure, tools, or people to help them. Without a robust support system, there’s no foundation upon which prototypes can be created. It’s important that when you’re bringing in this vision to strengthen the core, you provide a small disruption-fit talent network to allow the team to quickly try out the different hypotheses and come up with a solution.

Keep it Lean

Lastly, keep it lean. Don’t look at organisations as machines, where you’ve got silos and bureaucracy. Look at organisations as organisms which thrive on action, flexibility and agility. Leadership is about enabling action, and there could be anyone at a given point of time taking the baton and driving the rest of the organisation together.

It’s important that when you are looking at new elements that are disruptive to fuel curiosity, you also create an organisation which is lean at the same time. This is an organisation that has the necessary support to strengthen the core and articulate the vision, while setting big audacious goals which forces people to start thinking in a direction which contradicts or even defies age-old paradigms.

At this point, you might be thinking: how do I go about setting the right goals for my team? You might have seen leaders who set goals that are fairly broad or vague. These goals give their teams the flexibility to go look at other industries that are completely unrelated, to understand how they solve a particular problem. But these vague goals often end up causing the team to lose out in terms of their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). On the other hand, overly specific goals can oftentimes kill curiosity.

Always travel between what are the goals you must hit, and allow for minimum deviation in what the goal should be. But at the same time allow for flexibility so you can be surprised by what comes back to you. What if your team has discovered something you didn’t even ask for?

Break your goal-setting down into three smaller parts. The first is your must-dos or big bets, these are the things you have to do as an organisation. Everyone in the organisation knows what the big bets are. You ask the manager of the team, you ask the Vice President (VP), they will know what the five or six big bets in the organisation are.

The second part is determining the moon shot. It would be great if you can deliver the moon shot, otherwise, if you only finish 50 percent of what the moon shot is, it’s still good. And that gives your organisation the aspiration to deliver beyond your expectations.

The third one is contained experimentation. Contained experimentation is when you would like your team to experiment with new solutions but through a specified approach.

For example, let’s say you want to explore the application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in helping to improve customer sentiment. What it does is that it gives you two finite things, one is that you have to use NLP, the second is that you have to improve customer sentiment.

Within that sandbox, the sky's the limit. This set of goals gives you the opportunity to provide the flexibility that is required, which is to contain the experimentation, and the moon shot because it has to be disruptive, while bringing in the governance that every organisation must develop.

Inviting Exploration

There are two types of individuals you meet when you try to encourage curiosity within your organisation. The first type are those who are constantly looking for external solutions, which they can quickly integrate with the existing solution to solve a problem. Then there are those who are super confident. It’s not that they don’t want to look for the solution that’s out there, but that they believe they can build a solution better than anyone else.

Personally, I think that both these cultures are important. It’s crucial to create your own intellectual property, your own patents, and therein your competitive advantage. But obviously it isn’t going to happen if you rely too heavily on leveraging external solutions. Having said that, you also don’t want to build something that’s already a commodity product.

Let’s say we follow a two by two matrix, along two axes: degree of sophistication and degree of differentiation. If there is already a particular solution that is a commodity, but it still takes you time to build it, and even if you build it, you wouldn’t be able to create a distinctive competitive advantage, then there’s no point pursuing it. Instead, you would be better off leveraging on existing solutions. But what if there is a particular solution that is unproven today? If it is non-existent or it gives you a level playing field, or you believe that your competitors have not seen the maximum benefit, then it’s worth building the solution in-house.

Every two weeks, we invite three or four start-ups from a particular sector which we are currently focusing on in to this discussion session called a Knowledge Cafe. We then box them into the leadership area that they have solved for, and help them work on other areas that they could also learn from. There is a constant knowledge repository that is being built, so when there’s a particular problem that arises tomorrow, we are able to quickly connect it to the particular start-up that we can learn from.

These sessions also help us do competitive benchmarking. For example, in the different fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which are the ones that are becoming commodities, which sectors are becoming saturated, and what we could start building. Tapping into the insights of other companies, we are able to focus on tools out there that the business should quickly tap into, as well as tools we could build ourselves to create a competitive advantage for the organisation and perhaps monetize as an additional source of revenue.

Pitfalls to Avoid

One reason why leaders tend to dismiss curiosity in their employees is a lack of bandwidth. As your responsibility increases in the organisation, you realise that you have limited time and become impatient when your people are behaving in a way that you deem ideal. Even if it’s exploring how to solve a particular problem, if the team is not picking up on the way you want it to go, you might admonish them or disregard the topic and focus on something else.

When you have a discussion with your team, set a context of what the boundaries or expectations are. For example, you could tell your team they have three weeks to spend on cracking a problem, so they’ll have time to look for solutions externally. On the other hand, if it’s a challenge that needs a solution within a week, their scope to venture out and explore for solutions would naturally be limited.

Another big deal breaker is the decision making. Suppose your team comes back to you with a couple of hypotheses and prototypes, and all you do is keep them in a limbo without making a decision. This could be because you don’t want to hurt them by not approving their ideas. Or maybe you don’t want to face pushback from your superiors by taking risks. Either way, open communication with your team on your plan of action will encourage them to see things from your point of view while staying motivated to be curious.

The third deal breaker is the lack of support. You got a team which has come back with a prototype, and they would need some access to resources and spend some time on it. As leaders, you’ve got to help them prioritise, look because you’ve got this great idea, and because we wanted you to focus on solving this particular problem, I’m okay with you dropping this other project. So it’s about being empathetic, and more importantly, when the individual, who has been sweating it out and thinking about the job beyond the office, comes back to you, the least you could do is to ensure that you encourage him. But also give the individual the necessary resources as support, be it in terms of resources or infrastructure, for him to actually put in all the effort and make the target a success.

1. Have Creativity Meet Business Goals

Both the creator and the consumer need to understand each other’s language. The person who’s coming up with the creative idea needs to understand the language the business speaks. Similarly, the person who’s consuming the idea needs to understand the language that the creator is speaking. Only when you have a harmonious equivating of creative ideas is when the two entities of the organisation can understand each other.

2. Excite the Organisation

Leaders need to know how to tell a story, to activate the vision by bringing in a story. You should give your vision a date and present it to your team as a newspaper article or press release that will be published on that date. This will ensure that everyone has a sense of belonging to the vision and that everyone is happy with it.

3. Come Back with An Idea Backed by Facts

Besides having the ability to tell a story, you should also have the ability to look at the facts. Slowly, when you are able to provide your leadership with the right facts, with the right application and the impact, you will be able to get the minds of your followers swayed and get the support that you need.