Chapter 5
Fuel Curiosity
Challenge and curiosity go hand in hand. Firing up both in the workplace paves the road to innovation and to happy, productive teams that are more likely to reach their potential for success. It’s easy to settle into thinking everything is on track, but is what we’re seeing just an illusion?
We shouldn’t be afraid to challenge assumptions made within our organization and be relentlessly, assertively curious, not letting ourselves or others dampen our quest for answers. We should also inspire curiosity in others and avoid complacency. The results can be surprising—and highly productive.
Seeing Past the Illusion of Success
Here’s an old brain trick: look at the illustration at the top of the next page. Which line is longer? You know this trick. They are the same, right?
Figure 5-1 The Müller-Lyer illusion: which figure is longer?
In taking off the fins, we dispel the illusion:
Figure 5-2 The Müller-Lyer illusion: the lines are shown without the ends.
Now we can see the difference in length, 10 percent, more clearly:
Figure 5-3 With the lines closer together, the 10 percent difference in length becomes more apparent.
Maybe you weren’t fooled because you anticipated a trick. A curious mind might have tried to hack the trick and see through the illusion, which was named for German sociologist Franz Carl Müller-Lyer in 1889, who created it. Even when you know it’s a brain trick—a visual illusion—it’s still hard to see it differently.
While we can mentally adjust to what we think we see, it’s much harder to adjust or change what we think we know. Such cognitive illusions can be more persistent and harder to dispel than visual ones.
Years ago, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman was invited to give a lecture at a financial-management firm that specialized in managing portfolios of very wealthy clients. In his book Thinking Fast and Slow, he writes that, before his presentation, he was given a spreadsheet that reflected the previous eight-year investment performance of the top twenty-five financial advisors at the firm.1 Each year’s performance was the basis of each advisor’s yearly bonus. The better the return, the higher the bonus. Using the data, Kahneman could easily compute the correlation coefficients between the advisor rankings in each pair of years—comparing year one with year two, then year one with year three, year one with year four, and so on—for each advisor at the firm.
Kahneman anticipated that he would find only small differences in persistence of trading skill over the years among the top twenty-five advisors. But what he found instead exceeded even his own expectations. The average of correlations comparing all advisors’ performance over an eight-year period was only 0.01, or effectively zero. In other words, the firm believed it was providing bonuses based on trading skill, but in fact the data showed nonexistent, or negligible, difference in skill among the top twenty-five advisors. The firm was clearly rewarding luck, not skill.
Armed with this bomb, Kahneman gave his presentation to the executive team. He thought the financial executives would be shocked and astonished to discover that there was virtually zero statistical difference in their skill as traders, and, furthermore, that their own reward system was based on a fallacy.
The reaction of the executives was instead blasé. It was as if he had reported some obscure statistic that was irrelevant to their work. The audience clearly believed the results that Kahneman presented—how could they dispute facts? But they reacted as though the information were peripheral or entirely unrelated to their work, as if it were meaningless and extraneous.
The reason is the illusion of expertise, or what Kahneman calls the “illusion of validity.” When we, as highly trained experts and professionals in our field, are presented with information that is contrary to our deeply ingrained experience or way of doing things, we ignore or invalidate the information. We dismiss the finding as extraneous and unconnected. And these persistent beliefs are further reinforced by the professional cultures we work in.
The point here is that people and teams with high levels of confidence, when highly subjective and reinforced by homogenous cultures, can be unreliable in terms of accuracy. When weighing a decision, we should not only get second and third opinions but get them from different perspectives and areas of expertise. Or, as Harvard professor Daniel Gilbert advises in his book Stumbling on Happiness, it’s far better to get advice from people who have actually experienced what you are contemplating.2 But, as Gilbert explains, this can be especially difficult, because we tend to believe that we are special and therefore we know what will satisfy us better than someone else, even someone who has lived through the very same decision-making events that we are contemplating.
The only way to gain new ideas by soliciting the advice of others is to ask questions to which we honestly don’t know the answer. When we do ask someone else for advice, it’s also important to thoughtfully consider their answers, instead of discounting them. We can start with the small act of listening intently and trying to learn something new instead of simply waiting for our turn.
Asserting Our Curiosity
You can spot a real expert versus a phony. Look for three little words: “I don’t know.”
Phonies will have all the answers, while experts will be willing to admit what they don’t know. Real experts are relentlessly curious, even assertively curious—that is, they will demand explanations for things that many others simply accept as rules.
Creativity consistently ranks among the most sought-after and valued characteristics of workers today. Executives know that the next killer app, product, service, or innovation is going to come from relentlessly curious and creative people. The most desirable professionals today are happy, collaborative, and have hustle, but, above all, they are relentlessly curious and creative.
In a September 2015 study, the pharmaceutical company Merck surveyed more than 2,600 people on the value of creativity in the workplace and the ways in which the company encouraged (or stymied) creative practices.3 While a staggering 90 percent agreed that the best ideas come out of persistent and curious behavior, including constantly questioning company practices, fewer than 25 percent of those working today described themselves as curious people.
We are more likely to call ourselves “organized” or “diligent,” or even “friendly,” than to call ourselves “creative.” If anything, creativity is becoming even more scarce in this highly demanding work environment. According to a study by the software firm Adobe, more than 80 percent of us say the pressure to be more productive is increasing in intensity.4 As work pressure builds to be more productive, our work environments increasingly stifle imagination.
Here’s an interesting fact about people who describe themselves as curious and creative: these people are also assertive. Curious people are decision makers. They are influencers. In interviews, they often say they have direct influence over the outcome of decisions and change.5 If you think of the people in your company and community who consistently drive change, I bet you will be thinking of inquisitive people— people willing to ask the hard questions.
That may seem counterintuitive. After all, if we are busy questioning the world around us, aren’t we in a listening and receptive mode, and not in a decisive, action-taking mode? But these two behaviors—deeply questioning and then taking action—reinforce levels of creative engagement. This is because highly creative people also tend to be fearlessly persistent. They often describe themselves as “adventurous” and “risk taking.”
Another characteristic of highly curious and creative people is that they are generally less affected by peer pressure. They tend to follow their values, even when their path runs counter to what the group is doing.
These tendencies toward curiosity and assertiveness start when we are quite young, and should be carefully guarded and sustained throughout our lives to constantly nurture a growth and learning mindset.
Reaping the Rewards of Persistent Curiosity
One day our daughter, Annie, and I were at a drugstore picking out a card for her to send to a friend. She was seven years old at the time. In the card display was a big section dedicated to Taylor Swift. We examined each card—Taylor Swift looking dreamy, sassy, alluring, or even defiant. Taylor can certainly strike a pose. I asked Annie to pick one.
“I can’t decide,” she said . .. then, “Wait, what about that one?”
It was the display poster, the marquee advertising the Taylor Swift section of the greeting cards. “Well, that’s not for sale, sweetie,” said the sales clerk we asked. “It’s just the banner—you know, the poster for all the Taylor Swift cards.”
Turning to me, Annie says, “Yeah. Can we get it?”
There was also a little sign saying the Taylor Swift card collection was being replaced in a few days. I shrugged. “Let’s ask,” I said. I took the poster from the wall, and Annie carried it to the checkout counter.
“I can’t find a price on this,” the clerk said.
I replied, “Yes, well, we know it’s . . . ah . . . the display poster. But the sign says you are getting rid of the cards in a couple days. Can we have it?”
The clerk frowned. “I need to talk to the manager.”
We waited, and the manager arrived, looked at the poster, and said, “I’m sorry but we don’t own those banners. The card company does. We can’t give them away.”
I turned and saw Annie’s face wrinkle in confusion. “But why not?” she asked.
For a second, no one moved. Then the manager said, “Tell you what. If you give us your phone number, we’ll ask the card company and call you if they say you can have it.” I was pretty skeptical, but Annie’s face lit up and she carefully wrote down our phone number for the manager as I said it out loud.
We drove home, and I forgot all about it. But Annie didn’t forget. Sure enough, about ten days later, the drugstore manager called and asked if we still wanted the poster. Within the hour, that Taylor Swift poster was hanging in our daughter’s bedroom.
What did my daughter teach me from this? When in doubt, ask.
People who are seen by others as getting assertiveness right often mistakenly think they’ve gotten it wrong. In a 2014 study by doctoral students at Columbia Business School, 57 percent of those who believed that they were appropriately assertive in their requests and negotiations were actually seen by the other party as not adequately assertive or demanding.6 In other words, more than half didn’t ask for enough.
On the other hand, those who believe that they have been overly assertive and demanding in their requests and negotiations often fall victim to a belief that they have “crossed a line” and gone too far in their requests. The result is that they backpedal, try to smooth things over, and acquiesce to a lesser deal.
That’s a bummer, because in the study those who were assertive and demanding were often interpreted by the other party as fair and appropriate.
According to the research, we should go for it and ask for a little more—and not back off or feel badly about what we ask for. This sense of assertive curiosity can be fueled by creating environments in which we constantly seek to suppress any tendency to be impressed by our own power and prestige, and instead seek to empathize and understand our teammates and colleagues.
Cultivating Curiosity by Shifting Perspective
“When you become successful is when you should be especially wary that you’re about to become an idiot,” says Bob Sutton of Stanford University. “And there’s a lot of evidence to support that.”7
Remember, our goal in this chapter is to focus on nurturing curiosity, within ourselves and in those around us, demonstrating that fueling creativity in others is a small act of leadership that will eventually lead to big impact, driving innovation for our entire organization. There is good evidence to suggest that our own success can stifle the curiosity of those around us, so it’s important not to get too inebriated by our own sense of power and prestige. A powerful antidote to power poisoning is learning to take the perspective of someone else, to set aside our own agenda for a moment and consciously attempt to understand another’s point of view.
One way to fuel the creativity of those around us is simply to work on understanding, and communicating back to them, their own perspective.
Robert Litchfield, associate professor at Washington & Jefferson College, has been studying the link between individual creativity, team dynamics, and the way management interventions psychologically affect people in organizations. He and his colleagues started their study, “Linking Individual Creativity to Organizational Innovation,” with the premise that individuals all possess their own perspective, and those perspectives are not, of course, always the same.8 For example, the restaurant investor will have a different perspective from the restaurant manager, and again a different perspective from the restaurant waiter.
The literature is full of studies on and references to failed communication and failed innovation, because it’s difficult to both understand and align disparate perspectives—particularly from people operating in different departments in an organization. Litchfield’s hypothesis at the outset of the study was that, if we could create a mechanism in which individuals were free to express their ideas, and were willing and encouraged to understand another’s ideas, innovation would follow more readily. The researchers called this mechanism “perspective taking.”
Perspective taking is the exercise of intentionally shifting from trying to convince others of an idea to trying to understand the ideas and perspectives of others. As the researchers note, perspective taking is an imperfect act, but evidence suggests that it often produces greater cooperation between individual perspective takers and those whose perspectives are taken.
The exercise of conscientiously taking another’s perspective tends to elevate communication and openness to new ideas, because other team members feel a greater sense of empathetic interest. Those team members who exercised perspective taking also learned how to more effectively communicate new ideas to the team, because those members were better practiced in understanding the perspectives of others.
The formal hypothesis of Litchfield and his colleagues, which they later demonstrated, was, “The association between individual creativity and organizational innovation will be stronger when individual perspective-taking is high than when it is low.”
In the experiment, they surveyed 146 triads (teams of three), each composed of a focal employee (the experiment target), a coworker, and a boss. Then each person was asked to evaluate four variables: how creative that focal employee was, how well he or she took others’ perspectives, how creative the team he or she worked on was, and how innovative the organization was.
Their results were straightforward: “We found evidence that when individual creativity is high, the combination of individual perspective-taking and a highly creative team environment strengthens its link to organizational innovation.”
As Litchfield and his colleagues demonstrated, the small, intentional act of seeking to understand another’s perspective has a direct and powerful effect on accelerating collaboration and innovation.
Inversely, when we become intoxicated by our own sense of importance and inebriated with an inflated sense of self-importance and power, we tend to belittle—or ignore—the ideas (and even presence) of those around us.
In a study illustrating the intoxicating effects of a sense of elevated importance, social psychologist Paul Piff, at the University of California, Berkeley, and his graduate students discovered that people who drove fancy, expensive cars were far more unlikely to yield to pedestrians at a crosswalk.9
Piff and his students monitored hundreds of vehicles over many days and recorded whether or not they yielded. Fifty percent of those vehicles classified in the most expensive category (BMWs, Mercedes, Porsches, etc.) failed to yield, while none of the vehicles classified in the most inexpensive category broke the law at the crosswalk.
This is not to say that, universally, only rich people are prone to breaking minor laws but rather, Piff described in his research, that we all have competing motivations throughout our lives. In fact, it’s not wealth alone that prompts individuals to believe they are above the law but rather the power disparity between themselves and those around them. According to an article on the Workplace Bullying Institute website, power disparities in the workplace have been directly correlated with workplace bullying, pay inequities, and even sexual harassment.10
According to Piff, “Small psychological interventions, small changes to people’s values, small nudges in certain directions can restore levels of egalitarianism and empathy.” He suggests that little but consistent prompts and positive social cues can make a big difference. He and his colleagues have discovered that small interventions, such as listening to a story depicting childhood poverty, remind us of the existence of social inequity in the world and restore empathetic behavior.
But as we explore next, once we understand and nurture the curiosity of those around us, sometimes we also need to let go.