FROM OUR CEO: WE’RE ALL IN ON CURIOSITY
Advice and assumptions are killing your company.
This might not be immediately obvious to you (and apologies for stating it in such stark terms), but let that sink in for a moment. Because even if it’s exaggerated, we at Box of Crayons maintain that if your organizational culture is more advice-driven than curiosity-led, then you are missing valuable opportunities to be more innovative, resilient and successful.
No one would ever admit to being an incurious person. There’s something noble about curiosity, and I’d guess that most people would consider themselves to be curious by nature. What’s interesting is that curiosity — this thing that is cultivated in most of us as children and admired by most of us in adulthood — is actually a lot harder to practice and to encourage in our adult lives. How many open-ended questions do we really ask these days? How often do we embrace (rather than deny) the really tough questions that might not have definitive answers?
From Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Maria Montessori and beyond, the value of curiosity has primarily been determined by childhood educators and adolescent researchers, who have theorized how curiosity increases our potential and ability to learn. What is curious (see what I did there?) is that both our individual capacity for curious behaviours and our institutional commitment to its flourishing seem to drop off in adulthood with the severity of a coastal shelf.
Given that we spend more of our lives as employees in organizations than as pupils in schools, this seems like a gap worth exploring further. This is not about demeaning people, but about asking: why don’t adults apply the same attention to nurturing our curiosity as we do when we’re children? As any list of the most sought-after capabilities of the future shows, the ability to develop and see learning as a lifelong endeavour reminds us how important it is to keep paying attention to what drives human curiosity and the desire to learn.
WHAT’S AT STAKE?
Let’s think about the consequences of this in terms of organizational and business success.
