How many times have you heard recently of an organisation or a process that is due for reimagining, rebuilding, or future-proofing? We live in a time where organisational wisdom has shifted from a company’s sum of experience and expertise to a willingness to open up, to be flexible, and to play with the boundaries of how we see the world and our place in it. Underpinning this pursuit of how things could be and possibly will be is curiosity — organisational and collective, as well as individual.
Indeed, curiosity is seeing a renaissance, particularly across innovation-focused industries such as pharma, tech, and media. Corporations including Merck, Nike, Disney, Target, GE, NASA, Novartis, Facebook, the LEGO Group, Microsoft, and Dell have recognised and established curiosity as a key component in their corporate branding. For a company to be seen as curious has become a ticket to higher quality of investor relations, recruitment, and talent retention.
In writing this article, I drew on a long-term dialogue with corporate champions of curiosity in the workplace, as well as discussions with executive education programme participants across industries. I coupled their input with years of experience in conducting experimental, action-oriented problem-solving modules and interventions for large businesses.
Based on this ongoing research, I propose that unlocking an organisation’s curiosity can deliver a host of fundamental benefits. In this age of disruption and large-scale organisational transformations, it can enable rapid adaptability. Curiosity can also be that key ingredient that wards off a return to complacency and protects employees from transformation fatigue and burnout. On the innovation front, an outlook of curiosity about others will spur collaboration within ecosystems as gateways to value creation and solving complex challenges.
Nonetheless, there are several factors at play that make embracing curiosity an uphill battle for companies. To start with, we have yet to reach a standard definition of what curiosity in
