Unleashing your business potential through curiosity

Curiosity is key to unleashing business potential. Encouraging all employees to be genuinely curious gives two huge benefits to any business.

Benefit 1 – Improved problem solving

By being genuinely curious, by asking good questions of customers, suppliers and of each other, employees will get to bottom of problems and come up with solutions far quicker than those who are less curious. Without curiosity there is a danger of just “plodding on” and continuing to do things the way they have always been done. Plodding on is not really suitable in a rapidly changing world and companies that do so will tend to plod off a cliff at some point. But, by asking good questions, by uncovering the root cause of issues, by being curious, an organisation can sense and adapt to that rapidly changing world and so avoid plodding off cliffs!

What this looks like in practice is asking lots of questions to get the bottom of problems. To do this, people must have the confidence to ask those questions and never feel like their curiosity will be put down. This is a cultural thing within a business and needs to be led from the top. The leaders of the organisation will set the tone for what is allowed: if questions are shut down or ridiculed then curiosity will be destroyed. If ideas and questions are never punished and are instead praised, then curiosity will flourish.

Benefit 2 – Reduced interpersonal conflict

Most interpersonal conflict occurs when people refuse to be curious. It is impossible to experience anger and frustration in a conversation if both parties are genuinely curious about what the other person thinks and feels. If you train yourself to be curious you will find those negative emotions melt away. You cannot be curious whilst you are angry and, likewise, you cannot be angry when you are curious. This is a great life hack applicable to any relationship and the benefits for a harmonious workplace should be obvious!

The science behind this is clear. Fear, anger, and other negative emotions come from the amygdala part of the brain. This is our “reptile” brain that controls our baser instincts. When faced with a challenging/stressful situation the amygdala will normally generate a fight, flight, freeze or fawn response. We experience these responses as anger or fear. Anger will make us fight, fear will make us run away, paralyse us or make us submit.

All these reactions are evolved to remove the source of stress as quickly as possible; this is incredibly useful in simple situations where the cause of the stress is the same as the problem being faced. A tiger, for example, is a cause of stress and is the very problem we need to run away from!

In the modern work environment, however, the root cause of the problem may be divorced from the cause of the stress. For example, a customer getting angry about a late order is the cause of the stress but is not the cause of the problem. The stress can be solved by rushing the order through and giving the customer a free pre-10 am delivery. But this solution does nothing to solve the actual cause of the problem i.e. why the order was not processed quickly enough.

The reptilian brain kills curiosity

The amygdala will hijack and overrule our neocortex, which is where higher reasoning occurs. This hijacking will force us to solve the cause of the stress but not necessarily the cause the problem. For that, we need to engage our reasoning skills, which requires curiosity. Curiosity is generated from the pre-frontal cortex. So, curiosity can only happen if we can shut up the amygdala response.

This is easier said than done. Our emotional responses to stressful situations like interpersonal conflict are hard-wired. The level to which people experience these negative emotions varies greatly from individual to individual and being self-aware of how we respond to stress is the first step in quieting down that pesky amygdala. If this is done, what we find is that most interpersonal conflicts are just down to basic misunderstandings rather than any one party being bad or stupid. Once curiosity can be engaged, this comes out and even a heated conflict tends to melt away.

Three ways to foster curiosity

1 Develop self-awareness

Help people become more self-aware through personal development plans. A personal development plan should be more than just skills training. Most people bumble through life blissfully unaware of what influences their decision making. We are very good at rationalising our decisions after the event, we make up a story as to why we acted that way or the other but the actual decision-making process was probably nothing like the story we make up afterwards.

Being aware of how we process information and make decisions and what things affect us means we can better check our thinking. This is particularly true when we are under stress or in conflict with others. If we can understand how we make decisions and, more than that, when we understand that different people will make decisions in very different ways, we can start to unravel a lot of the sources of conflict and miscommunication. It all stems from understanding yourself first.

2 Encourage multiple perspectives to flourish

Encourage everyone to look at things from multiple perspectives by asking “how is this person partly right?” rather than “why are they totally wrong?”. Often, we get stuck in “winning” an argument. We will then look for all the reasons why the other side is wrong. A better more curious approach is to try and work our how they are right.

Often we don’t do this and instead will ‘straw man’ an opponent’s position. When we straw man a position we deliberately distort the opposing argument to make it easier to attack and then demolish that through cold hard logic. An example would be if we were to look at argument for reducing fossil fuel usage so as to reduce green house emissions and say “So you want everyone to live in the cold and dark and walk everywhere.”
Obviously, no one thinks that and if they did it would be an easy position to defeat, which is the whole point of the straw-man! We humans use straw-man all the time. Watch out for it in arguments with your partner or kids:

Things like:

Argument: “No you can’t go out with your friends tonight you have school tomorrow”
Straw-man: “You obviously hate me and want me to have no friends.”

Argument: “Sorry I’m going to be late home from work tonight darling.”
Straw-man: “You just hate spend time with me and the kids.”

“Steel manning”, is the opposite of this, it is the process of trying to think through the very strongest, most plausible reasons for the position you are opposed to and then trying to tackle those reasons. If you do it well, you might even state the opposing
position better than the person you are disagreeing with can. When one does this, often the nuggets of truth come out, and you may find that the very process of steel manning changes some of your position.

When we do this properly, we are playing different game: we are not trying to win. We are, instead, interested in the truth. It is very rare that any reasonable person is 100% wrong about something. More often than not, they will be at least partly right. Steel
manning brings out that partial truth and the only cost of this is to your ego when you forgo the satisfaction of pummelling your opponent with brutal and devastating logic bombs.

3 Open speaking policy

In many businesses the mantra “time is money” gets in the way of curiosity. We
encourage our people to take the time to have the discussions with suppliers,
customers and each other. No one gets punished for spending time chatting to others. Through dialogues we learn about other people, their motives, desires, needs, worries and everything else. With that knowledge we can solve problems better. Why would we not encourage dialogue! The short term, purely transactional approach to conversations is, in our opinion, incredibly short sighted.

Conclusions and next steps

This article is one in our series on unleashing business potential through people power. We hope you found it useful. Please feel free to share it or, better still, let us know what you think with a comment. If you want to know more about how to unleash potential through people power then check out our other articles in the series.

And, if you want to know more about how our third-party logistics service can help you unleash your business potential by taking away all the hassle of logistics then please do give us a call.

UNLEASH YOUR BUSINESS POTENTIAL SERIES

1. CURIOSITY
2. COLLABORATION
3. CREATIVITY
4. CARING / COMPASSION
5. CALMNESS
6. ACCOUNTABILITY