Curiosity and Corporate Culture 

Such different atmospheres are found also across teams. The design team will invariably have a different feel than the legal team. It depends on the context they work in, the kind of people who work there, the average age, the management style, the local culture, and many other dimensions. Focusing on the nuclear unit of the team to drive organizational success is the right strategy.

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Curiosity is felt at the level of the team. 

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This does not mean the overarching organization, or the C-suite, has no role to play. Quite the contrary. Though it is possible to find pockets of curious teams in otherwise incurious environments, the culture and climate the CEO creates has a direct impact on the curiosity level of the organization. 
 

At an organizational level, curiosity is the driver for creativity and innovation. When comparing curiosity to the growth mindset concept, I agree with curiosity researcher and leadership consultant Alison Horstmeyer: 
 

“Curiosity is growth mindset in action.” 
 

Curiosity does not settle for the status quo; instead, it retains a healthy level of humility and allows divergent opinions to emerge. It also supports organizational learning through active openness to processes, like after-action reviews, especially a desire to learn from things that went south. Curious organizations create a positive brand for themselves. When I ask people about their top three curious companies, Steve Jobs’ Apple is often mentioned. Most people want to work for successful brands with a clearly articulated purpose. 
 

Curious organizations allow for curiosity to thrive through their culture, processes, and practices and believe the curiosity muscle of every employee needs to be nourished. They also believe this muscle can be enhanced with curiosity-en-hancing tools to unlock its power. They know to tap into the collective wisdom of all employees they need to embrace curiosity and banish fear. As John Hunt in The Art of The Idea writes, “Fear might be a strong catalyst for entrenching obedience, but it’s a lousy motivator for fresh thinking” (Hunt 2009). 
 

Though the C-suite and management in organizations are generally in favor of the notion of curiosity, the situation on the ground can be different. 
 

Microsoft 
 

Did Satya Nadella fully know he was about to start an internal revolution at Microsoft when he took the helm in February 2014? He did realize, under his predecessor Steve Ballmer, Microsoft had become a sluggish multinational company. Steve Ballmer had grown the business, yet he had steered Microsoft in an unfavorable direction. While the first stint of Microsoft under Bill Gates can be characterized as entrepreneurial, CEO Ballmer had introduced a reductive textbook management culture. Conformity and obedience were more important than curiosity and challenging the status quo. People in power, whether they were technical experts or in leadership positions, were carrying weight and not to be questioned. They also were supposed to have unwavering answers to all questions, or so they told themselves. 
 

Satya Nadella realized brewing underneath was an unhealthy culture. Instead of focusing on the easy way out, i.e., organizational restructuring and lay-offs, his surgery tackled something deeper: the underlying culture. Before he tackled his partnership strategy, acquisitions, and technology investments, he refocused the company toward a growth mindset, curiosity, and non-violent conversations. What is important to know is this mindset was already part of his own personality, and he was able to imprint his beliefs and values on this organization. In Mr. Nadella’s own words, “A growth mindset thrives in the diversity of ideas, and if the culture inhibits psychological safety, then people may not freely bring both good and bad ideas forward, which will limit innovation” (Hoffman 2021). 
 

The results of the Microsoft turnaround are remarkable. 
 

Beyond early start-ups, which often have a highly curious and passionate founder, I am seeing other companies also embracing curiosity for their organizations. For instance, the CEO of Novartis, Vas Narasimhan, is also a highly curious individual: he has imprinted his personality on Novartis by changing its people values to “inspired, unbossed, and curious”—this has led the HR team to change their processes and their L&D organization to focus more on curiosity. It starts most of the time at the top, yet it does not have to be this way. I have observed single teams create the right curious environment for themselves before the wider organization got interested. 
 

What we have seen is since the end of the twentieth century and the recent COVID-19 crisis, change can be difficult for those companies not open to it. We can easily remember IBM believing a PC in every home would be foolish, Kodak not envisioning digital photography would take over analog photography, or Nokia not believing phones would be smarter than just talking voice devices. Even if some of their employees saw the storm coming, most of them did not, or at least the collective mind of these organizations did not give space to these new ideas to flourish. 
 

During COVID-19, we have seen in the same industries, some companies are thriving while others are barely surviving. This is because they are allowing for curiosity. They retain a level of wonder of what could be, a level of humility to make sure they don’t become arrogant, and a level of openness to make them change. 
 

Curious organizations are organizations engaging in two activities above what other successful companies do. First, they are intentional about creating the right environment for curiosity to flourish through their culture, values, processes, and practices. Second, they are also intentional about helping those individuals, leaders, and teams in building a curious mindset. Simply instructing people to “just be curious” does not make them so. 
 

Curiosity as the North Star 
 

Some companies have curiosity in their corporate values and are using this value as a North Star to follow. This is remarkable. When sharing a list of thirty companies on LinkedIn with curiosity articulated in their values, I got different reactions. Some people were proud of their organizations, yet some others were hesitant. When talking to them, some of them confessed curiosity is the most dif- ficult value they have, or it is the least developed one. One company executive shared with me that curiosity referred to the original work ethic of the company’s founders, yet their entrepreneurial (and curious) spirit had long been replaced by risk-averse management structures. A third type of reply to my post came from start-ups for not being included in the list, yet who had curiosity articulated in their values. 
 

Start-ups are a good breeding ground for curiosity. 
 

Organizational curiosity, just like individual curiosity, is a muscle that must be developed. Workplace curiosity in multinational companies can be a force to increase competi- tiveness, innovation, productivity, learning, and engagement, yet it is fragile if not managed intentionally. Even when they are not proactively engaged in curiosity, most organizations do have the foundations to build curious cultures. Harvard professor Francesca Gino confirmed, “By making small changes to the design of their organization and the ways they manage employees, leaders can encourage curiosity and improve their companies and make rapid changes” (Gino 2018). 
 

Before we dive in further, it is important to state the obvi- ous: curiosity is not a free for all. The best organizations and leaders can know when to allow for exploration and when to stop exploration and move into exploitation. Agility and curiosity go hand in hand. In December 2020, the company SurveyMonkey came out with a report stating, the combined set of curiosity and agility were the two best predictors whether a company would survive the backlash of COVID-19. They defined curiosity as the openness to try new things and agility as the speed by which these new things could be productized or materialized. This also has been my finding in the context of effective curious leaders. Curious leaders know when to allow curiosity/ ideation/experimentation and when to move to action (SurveyMonkey 2020). 
 

Another way to look at this is the following: Agility means the ability to change fast and be flexible. Curiosity is the underlying mindset as it provides the desire to change and provides its overall direction. Interestingly, both agility and curiosity are relatively new concepts in the management literature. 
 

IntentionaIity Versus the Chernobyl Effect 
 

The Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster is an extreme example of how things can go wrong. According to the online Encyclopedia Britannica, the reason the core of the nuclear power plant in Ukraine melted was one of a series of human errors that could have been avoided. It is a telling metaphor for companies and incuriosity, a closed, fixed, and conformist mindset, and a collective cognitive bias. It shows a disregard for broader exploration of the reasons behind a crisis and a desire to ask only questions when the answers are predictable. 
 

Curiosity is not reserved only for start-ups. I have observed scale-ups and large organizations who are also able to embrace the notion of exploration as part of their operations; who are creating cultures, processes, and practices to celebrate curiosity, who allow their employees to take calculated risks and encourage them to stick out their necks; who create a climate of openness where it is okay to ask questions, and it is not a blemish if the leader does not have all the answers. Curious organizations also have learned, it is more profitable to treat people like creative authentic agents rather than cogs in a mechanistic system, able to be exchanged at a whim. 

Intentionality is an important factor in management. If left to chance, curiosity will likely not flourish. What gets measured gets done. Some companies are intentional about workplace curiosity in a single process (e.g., curiosity only reserved for leadership) or single function (e.g., curiosity only valued in departments such as R&D or HR functions such as recruitment or learning and development). 
 

Who Would you Promote? 
 

No company is 100 percent curious or 100 percent incurious. There are gradations of curiosity as well as levels of intentionality. All companies are to be found somewhere between these two extremes. Indeed, organizational curiosity is a state. It is something that evolves, something that grows or withers. Start-ups tend to be high on curiosity. One dimension of curiosity is the acceptance of failure: in comparing start-ups with global large-scale traditional organizations, I have found start-ups are four times readier to learn from failures versus established organizations. This also means large organizations are four times less ready to consider failures as learning opportunities. 
 

Curiosity is the driver for innovation, for never settling for the status quo, for retaining a healthy level of organizational humility, for actively allowing divergent opinions to emerge. It also supports organizational learning through active openness to processes like for instance after-action-reviews, especially a desire to learn from things that went south. 
 

Though the C-suite and management in organizations are generally in favor of the notion of curiosity the situation on the ground can be different. When asking professionals whether their organizations are curious, about 84 percent are positive. This makes sense; we can all associate some form of curiosity on the work floor. Seventy-four percent of the same group of professionals, however, also share their organizations created barriers that stifle curiosity. 
 

These findings are echoed by research from Harvard Business School studying curiosity from employees in a wide range of firms and industries. The researchers found only about 24 percent reported feeling curious in their jobs on a regular basis, and about 70 percent said they face barriers to asking more questions at work (Gino 2018). 
 

Organizations can support or stifle curiosity through its practices, processes, culture, and climate. I often present the following situation to executives. Imagine you are part of a promotion committee. Your brief is to review the cases of two candidates and select only one of them to be promoted. 
 

1. Jeff deserves to be on the list. He performed consis- tently over time and has proven year after year to be a loyal employee. Whatever challenges he is asked to take on, he will deliver. Managers like him. 
 

2. Mary also has made it to the shortlist. She also has been performing well in her core tasks. Some colleagues have complained she does not always follow the rules. She is known to ask tough questions of management. She has been fiercely loyal. Last year, she volunteered to join a team looking at an innovative customer project. If successful, this project would have the potential of bigger things. Even the board was interested in this project. As it happens, the project failed miserably. Nobody dares to talk about it. 
 

Who will you promote? 
 

I have done this experiment with thousands of people. What I find time after time is: executives say their organizations promote Jeff; while at the same time they add, it should be in fact Mary who should be promoted. 

Traits of Curious Companies 
 

We can distill the following differences between curious and incurious companies.

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