How Curious Are You Really?

Curiosity plays a pivotal role in innovation, exploring feedback, and making quality decisions.

Many well-known leaders credit curiosity as the reason for their extraordinary success. Good leaders are naturally inquisitive people, which makes them better at building relationships and navigating situations they haven’t seen before.

But are the best leaders truly curious, or is there something else at play in how they explore what they don’t know?

The answer comes down to two distinctive ways of being curious. Most leaders have one but not the other.

Task curiosity describes the interest leaders and practitioners take when confronting a problem or opportunity.

Rather than solve a problem or pursue an opportunity, people with task curiosity gather evidence much like a detective, attempting to understand what caused the problem or how to take full advantage of the opportunity.

Rather than be satisfied with a solution or approach, they want to get to the heart of the issue so they know how to avoid or create it in the future.

Task curiosity is narrow in scope and situationally specific. Think of a plumber looking for the source of a leak or an analyst searching for data to support a model or conclusion.

The parameters of curiosity defined by a task can be expanded to include conversations with other experts, experimenting with alternative solutions or approaches, and scenario planning and role-playing to incorporate new perspectives.

Most leaders and successful team members possess a healthy dose of task curiosity. It is one of the qualities that make leaders good at focused learning and strategizing.

But it is not the kind of curiosity that shapes lifelong learning and that leads to big insights and breakthrough thinking.

Intellectual curiosity is about constantly looking for new information and seeking novel ways to combine this data with what one already knows.

Those with this brand of curiosity have a strong desire to explore and understand new concepts and ideas not connected to their current assignments or tasks.

They want to understand how things work, experience new perspectives, expand their knowledge, and build new learning relationships. The payoff of this curiosity is never clear. The learning is the reward.

Everyone likes to think they are intellectually curious, but most people aren’t. If they are curious at all, it tends to be about tasks. Yet, intellectual curiosity is what feeds lifelong learning and fosters differences in critical thinking and creativity.

Nothing stimulates intellectual curiosity like reading widely in different formats and media on a variety of subjects, topics, and issues.

Unfortunately, the algorithms used by contemporary search engines tend to narrow our exposure to new subjects rather than expand them.

Amazingly, developing intellectual curiosity in a time of limitless information access is more difficult than ever before.

It’s time to break through what is fed to you and begin expanding what you learn about. Let your curiosity become greater than what task is in front of you.