Curating Cultures that Encourage Curiosity
The case for building a curious organization
In a compelling essay published this past weekend—about the Palestinian author Omar El Akkad, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and the student-led protests in Serbia—Swedish translator and author Sara Stridsberg recalls that the French writer Marguerite Duras once said, “We always miss the most important thing.”
Stridsberg’s entire essay got me thinking. I ordered Omar El Akkad’s book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. And I’ve been following the pro-democracy demonstrations in Serbia; last March, nearly a million people marched together in the capital city of Belgrade. That line from Duras—one of the most important French writers of the 20th century—especially caught my attention, though. Trying to satisfy my curiosity, I spent quite a while online searching for the quote before finally getting back to what I was supposed to be doing. In the process, I did learn a lot about Duras—and I’m intrigued to learn more. My curiosity has been piqued.
In line with the anarchist belief that the means we use must align with the ends we want to achieve, that same curiosity feels consistent with the subject at hand. Daniel Gunn, Professor of English at the American University in Paris, writes, “In her nonfiction as well as her fiction, Marguerite Duras’s curiosity was endless.” I’m starting to realize I might say much the same about my own. I’m determined to figure out where that quote came from.
What follows is, indeed, about curiosity. What it is, why it matters, and why some people seem to have it in abundance while, for others, it seems all too often absent. Curious? I know I am!
This current curiosity kick, to be clear, did not come out of nowhere. It was initiated by someone I consider one of the great “wonderers” of the modern American workplace: Jack Stack. I’ve known Jack for over 30 years now. He’s the man who, in the same period of national economic crisis in which we also opened the Deli in the early 1980s, kept asking simple questions no one else seemed to ask. In the process, he developed the life-changing approach that we all know now as Open Book Management. With Bo Burlingham, he co-authored the 1992 classic The Great Game of Business.
Last week, I had the honor of being the opening keynote at the annual Great Game of Business conference in Dallas. This gathering brings together open-book practitioners—like us here in the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses (ZCoB)—from pretty much every business you can imagine, and from all over the country. Some attendees had arrived from as far away as Brazil and Bulgaria. About 500 highly motivated folks were in the room that morning when I presented for an hour on the subject of dignity, drawing heavily on the pamphlet, “A Revolution of Dignity in the Twenty-First Century Workplace.” The talk, I’m happy to say, was well received. What stood out most for me, though, were the conversations that followed over the next couple days. The most common comments? Some version of, “You really got people thinking.”
In hindsight, what I seem to have done was spark attendees’ curiosity—leaving many eager to learn more about a word nearly everyone in attendance knew well, but only a handful had given much thought to. I can relate. That’s exactly where I was before I began the exploration and exposition that eventually became the dignity pamphlet, and most importantly, a discipline and a practice that I now work diligently to make real every single day.
After the keynote was completed, and most everyone else had left the auditorium to move into their various breakout sessions, Jack Stack ambled over to shake my hand and express his appreciation. He and I have known each other for many years now, but he hadn’t previously heard me present this new work I’d done around dignity. Jack said, “I love how you just keep learning new approaches, and that you can turn them into these models that people can really implement. You have this drive, that I love, to just keep learning.”
I have enormous respect for Jack, who tells it like it is. He doesn’t give compliments when he doesn’t mean them. And, in this case, he’s correct. I do have an enormous drive to keep learning new things, to understand the world at large, as well as our world at Zingerman’s, ever more effectively. He and I, without question, have that characteristic in common—the belief that there is always more to figure out, new understandings to arrive at, ways to make systems and products better by learning more about them. As Jack and I walked together, he said, “The one thing I keep trying to figure out is how do you get other people to have that drive for learning? I keep wondering: Can you teach people to be curious?”
As usual, Jack’s casually asked question was a good one. He certainly made me curious—I’ve been thinking about the subject ever since.
What happened to me in the following days with curiosity is consistent with the same positive pattern of inquiry I’ve initiated thousands of times in my life now. My personal experience of curiosity is a lot like scientist and author Richard Feynman, who writes, “Everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough.” Something sparks a small bit of interest—not especially enormous at first—and I start to study. Almost every time, the more I study, the more my curiosity grows. What begins as a small interest often becomes an intense fascination. My connection to curiosity is, we could say, akin to “compound interest”: what starts as a side-note worthy of a little investigation grows more engaging with each new learning I come across. In the case of The Power of Beliefs in Business, the curiosity, sparked originally by a couple of pages in Bob and Judith Wright’s Transformed! eventually evolved into a 600-page book.
In this case, my studies quickly showed me that curiosity is a super critical skill for anyone who aspires to lead more meaningfully, and/or live a more engaged, rewarding life. I like the life-framing that the great Finnish author and artist Tove Jansson shares in her book, Fair Play:
It is simply this: do not tire, never lose interest, never grow indifferent—lose your invaluable curiosity and you let yourself die. It’s as simple as that.
Jansson—also well known for her Moomins series of children’s books—wrote Fair Play in the early ’80s, the same era in which we were opening the Deli and Jack Stack was working on open book management. Sure enough, Jansson’s wise words could well apply to both Paul and me—and Jack as well.
Creative people who do compelling work, like Jansson and Stack, are very curious souls. They like to learn. They want to understand better, see more clearly. And they enjoy working really hard to get to that kind of clarity. Asked about the three most important qualities for any aspiring artist to develop, the remarkable Romanian-born, Alabama-living poet Alina Stefamescu—who has described herself at times as an “idealist anarchist”—recommends very much the same approach to life and work as Tove Jansson: “Relentless curiosity and the desire to be surprised by thinking.” After all, Stefanescu wonders aloud, “What can we know for certain?”
Designer and writer Leigh Patterson created an online construct called Moon Lists to help people enhance their curiosity. Patterson’s design and marketing clients include a number of folks I admire: Rishi Tea, Jacobsen Salt, Bunkhouse Hotels, Bumble and Bumble. Author Mary Bryce credits Patterson’s ability to effectively manage her curiosity as a key to the quality of her work: “Her curiosity and ability to frame ideas visually, as well as her obvious love for what is simple and true quietly remind me that there is no such thing as the mundane, if you pay attention.” This pattern is also consistent—many people are curious, but it’s the ability to turn that curiosity into meaningful learnings and practical applications that really makes the difference.
Like all of us, Patterson says, she can slip out of being curious. Her self-awareness helps her get back on track:
Like anyone I have lulls and days where I feel depleted. … I do my best to recognize these patterns and not sit around feeling defeated; I do something to mix it up and change my frame of mind. Go for a walk, go to the coffee shop, call a friend, do a headstand.
Curiosity, in this context, can often require a bit of time and space to cultivate. Those who rush to judgment and quick certainty, I’m realizing, are rarely coming from a place of curiosity. As Tove Jansson writes in Fair Play, “There are empty spaces that must be respected—those often long periods when a person can’t see the pictures or find the words and needs to be left alone.” Cultivating curiosity in our organizational culture means leaving time and creating spaces for that curiosity to come to fruition. It is, more often than not, not an overnight event.
With the state of the world being what it is, leaning into the hard-to-deal-with realities of trying to lead in difficult times, I feel a sense of urgency to find positive, productive, inclusive, and dignity-focused ways to help me and the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses get through all this with our ethics and integrity intact. I suppose that’s a long way to say I’m seriously curious about what the heck to do when it feels like a lot of things around us are coming apart. Staying calm is, of course, critical. So, too, I can see now, is curiosity. What once showed up for me mostly in childhood favorites like Curious George has revealed itself as an essential skill for anyone who wants to lead well and live a full, rewarding life.
Curiosity, when it’s used well, can also become a small but meaningful act of resistance against authoritarianism or long-standing, but maybe now out-of-date, social norms. In the same article I mentioned in the opening paragraph above, Sara Strindberg shares the story of Serbian artist Marija Ratković. Ratković, referencing the current moment of peaceful but powerful mass-resistance in her homeland, expresses her own sense of urgency: “This is our only chance. Our only moment to change anything.” In an interview from six years ago, Ratković talked about her determination to make a difference, and not to simply descend into the short-term comfort of indifference: “Faced with a wall, I had options—either I leave and change my citizenship, or I change this society. I chose the latter.”
In Marguerite Duras’ native French, société means “company.” What Ratković is writing about is indeed a challenge that we all face in our workplaces, in the ecosystems of our minds, or in the world around us. I feel a similar sense of urgency. Curiosity is a key tool to making this kind of change that Ratković is referring to actually happen. Dictators do not like curiosity. At least not in anyone who’s outside of their inner circle. Curiosity, they understand, can cause trouble. It leads people to wonder, to ask questions, to seek better answers, to try to figure out the mysterious “most important thing we’re missing” that Marguerite Duras wrote about. Curious people do not fall quickly into line, and many refuse to keep quiet. They seek to understand, to see if there are better ways to work and live. They do not generally follow orders blindly, the way “true believers” do. If they combine curiosity with courage and the ability to do creative work, they end up as active resistors.
Poet, playwright, and outspoken advocate for Ukrainian independence from late 19th-century Russian rule, Lesya Ukrainka (whom I wrote about this summer), was one of those people. Alex Scalzitti writes that, despite the physical and social hardships she endured throughout her life, “Ukrainka’s intellectual curiosity and determination never faltered.” This was the case, too, with Marguerite Duras. During WWII, she joined the French resistance. Her biographer Laure Adler says she was perpetually seeking to understand, “How can the human condition be changed? What was culture doing to alleviate the suffering of man?” In The Nation, Gili Ostield notes that “Duras famously considered writing to be a revolutionary act.”
The charge to get curious as an act of resistance is, in fact, ensconced in Timothy Snyder’s small but powerful book, On Tyranny. Snyder’s Lesson #11 is “Investigate”:
Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realize that some of what is on the internet is there to harm you. … Take responsibility for what you communicate with others.
It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society. The individual who investigates is also the citizen who builds.
In other words, get curious and start studying. Don’t settle for dictatorial directives that don’t make sense. Instead, seek the truth. Snyder’s directive is just as important in companies as it is in countries. Organizations composed of curious people have something of an edge on their competitors. If they’re both courageous and disciplined enough to turn their curiosity-driven learning into work that others can learn from—something everyone I’ve cited in this essay has done in abundance—Snyder says, one can make a meaningful difference in the world.
Emma Goldman, in her own anarchistic way, was exceptionally curious. She was also exceptional in her ability to convert that curiosity into cutting insights, along with practical, powerful, and inspiring life lessons. After Emma died in May of 1940 in Toronto, her friend, the designer Freda Diamond, observed, “She opened your mind and made you think about things you never thought about before. That was her outstanding characteristic. She made people think!” She was, in other words, able to consistently call up people’s naturally present curiosity.
In her autobiography, Living My Life, Goldman cites French socialist-anarchist writer and philosopher Augustin Frédéric Adolphe Hamon, who paints curiosity as the core of anarchist practice:
The typical Anarchist, then, may be defined as follows: A man perceptible by the spirit of revolt under one or more of its forms—opposition, investigation, criticism, innovation—endowed with a strong love of liberty, egoistic or individualistic, and possessed of great curiosity, a keen desire to know.
In the absence of curiosity, what takes its place is indifference, apathy, and disengagement—the “Energy Crisis in the American Workplace” I wrote about in Secret #19. This sort of indifference, Russian democracy advocate Vladimir Kara-Murza says regularly, is a big part of what makes the rise of authoritarianism possible. Asked about what it was like being such an active voice for democracy, putting his own freedom and life on the line over and over again, while watching Vladimir Putin continue to consolidate power, Kara-Murza shared, “What was most agonizing and exasperating for us in the Russian Democratic opposition was to watch the indifference with which this authoritarian slide was being met by the majority of Russian citizens.”
So, back to Jack Stack’s question: “Can you teach people to be curious?” My answer is, “Yes.”
It also seems to be a naturally occurring characteristic, at least when we’re young kids! Human beings, it seems, are born curious. Anyone with little kids knows that they are constantly asking, “Why?” In the right setting, that curiosity can be supported and encouraged. Christina Clemer, parent and Montessori teacher, writes, “I want my child to be curious, to be a relentless learner, a constant seeker of new information. As a teacher, it’s one of the things I want most.” She wrote a whole article in Motherly about how to encourage that curiosity and guide it in constructive ways. Unfortunately, far too many kids don’t have a Christina Clemer shaping their childhood learnings; social and parental pressure pushes them to skip their own curiosity and instead get clear on the “right answers” that others have prescribed for them.
Peter Senge said it well in the MIT Sloan Management Review 25 years ago:
Children come fully equipped with an insatiable drive to explore and experiment. Unfortunately, the primary institutions of our society are oriented predominantly toward controlling rather than learning, rewarding individuals for performing for others rather than for cultivating their natural curiosity and impulse to learn. The young child entering school discovers quickly that the name of the game is getting the right answer and avoiding mistakes—a mandate no less compelling to the aspiring manager.
In the worst cases, this crisis of curiosity can be what artist and musician Lonnie Holley, who grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, in deep poverty under Jim Crow, experienced:
We weren’t allowed to enjoy the same things others were allowed to enjoy. No one was standing around saying, “This boy seems really curious. Let’s teach him things so he can be a great leader in the future.” They tried to beat that curiosity out of me!
My own upbringing, in a middle-class, academically oriented Jewish family, was, in many ways, the opposite of what Lonnie Holley had to overcome. Like every family, we had our issues, but stifling curiosity was never among them. On the contrary, the culture I grew up in—flawed though it surely was—revolved around learning. Libraries, books, school, college, advanced degrees. In our world, curiosity and the learning it was meant to spark mattered more than money. In some sense, this essay is simply a continuation of what I was already practicing when I was six.
Teaching people to be curious depends in part on the systems in which they work. Structures that encourage people to ask questions create curiosity. Frameworks, or what we’ve long thought of here at Zingerman’s as “organizational recipes,” are a great way to do that. Like Emma Goldman, they make people think. In a sense, all of the dozens of frameworks and recipes we use so regularly here really require at least a modicum of curiosity in order to work. Our Training Compact, 3 Steps to Great Service, 5 Steps to Handling Customer Complaints, 6 Elements of Dignity, Lean, the “5 Whys,” 3 Types of Beliefs (positive, negative, neutral), and more. All of them invite the user to ask questions, of themselves and/or of others as well. All encourage people to explore what something means, what is possible, and what a positive solution would look like. Our long-standing belief in the value of continuous improvement and Bottom-Line Change® encourages us to apply our curiosity as well. We have, I see now, been curating curiosity in the ZCoB for decades now!
Although I only found her work 15 months ago, creative business writer Carol Sanford’s focus is well aligned with these approaches. In No More Gold Stars Sanford states with passion that her focus is on “helping people learn to think for themselves.” The quality of our lives, our workplaces, and our world, she writes, depends on it:
I believe it is necessary because so many of us have been trained out of this fundamental capacity. We are born with innate creativity, filled with the potential to become independent and innovative human beings who can exercise discernment and critical thinking. … Most of us are conditioned to look to others to do our thinking for us. … The consequences of this conditioning are beginning to shake the foundations of democracies around the world.
All of Sanford’s seven books, all of her talks and articles are, one way or another, about learning to think for ourselves, to be curious and ask questions instead of simply following orders and falling quietly into line. In Indirect Work, she says,
Collectively, we are trapped in a mechanistic (or even more archaic) paradigm, and this causes us to make seemingly logical and ethical choices that actually produce destructive results. The urgent question now is how to provide leadership that is more appropriate to the world we find ourselves in, a world that is in crisis precisely because of the paradigms from which we’ve been operating.
(In fact, writing this essay made me curious about my childhood hero, Curious George. In a New York Times article published 20 years ago this week and entitled “How Curious George Escaped the Nazis,” journalist Dinitia Smith explains how the original book, first published in 1941, was written by H.A. Rey and Margret Rey. The couple, it turns out, were German Jews who had escaped Germany for Brazil. Later, they came back to Paris for their honeymoon, and were in the French capital working when the Nazis quickly took control of the French capital on June 14, 1940, a month to the day after Emma Goldman had died in Canada. The honeymooning couple managed to escape, riding their way quietly out of Nazi-controlled Paris on bicycles. The draft of the first manuscript for the book was in their backpacks. Reaching Allied territory, a border policeman, worried that the two were spies, let them go after finding the draft of an illustrated children’s book in their luggage.)
Curiosity, it seems, is sort of like any other skill. To get good at it, we have to practice. Some of us have the benefit of having been brought up in cultures and communities in which curiosity was actively encouraged and supported. Others have had to push past settings in which “too much” curiosity can get you ostracized, or in harder situations still, incarcerated. Practice won’t ever make perfect, but it does sort of make permanent. When something—curiosity in this case—is in our regular routine, it shapes our brains accordingly. Each of us will, of course, have our own way of doing the work. You can see some of my ways in this essay. I encourage you to explore and develop your own.
In all this exploration, I came across Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic’s piece in the Harvard Business Review—“How to Strengthen Your Curiosity Muscle”—and a lot of what he laid out resonated. Among the “five science-based recommendations” he shares, he points out that curiosity grows when we’re willing to shake up our routines, carve out space to think more deeply, or even just start asking “why” a little more often.
I’ve been playing with these ideas in my own way. Here are some of the ways I’ve tried to put his techniques to work:
- Cut out all excuses. I work hard to learn to simply take responsibility, and then move right into starting to understand what went wrong.
- Change routines to see things in new ways—Try new things to get you thinking. Write a poem. Read a book. Take a short trip. Talk to folks you don’t usually talk to.
- Experiment with new approaches. Spend time in solitude. Try journaling. Read in an area of study you aren’t familiar with. Get to know a new culture.
- Find a better angle from which to enter a conversation. Telling ourselves a different story about a situation can often lead us to understand at a whole new level. It’s a call to get curious and explore the beliefs we’re using to frame the situation. Change the story, we change our beliefs; change our beliefs, we change the story. In either case, it’s an invitation to get curious and seek new insights.
- Try learning about something you’re not yet familiar with. When feeling anxious, disengaged, bored, or burnt out, start studying. For me at least, nine times out of ten, in a matter of minutes, I find myself fascinated with a subject I’d been wholly unfamiliar with even an hour earlier. Follow the threads. See what you learn. And then be curious—what can you do with what you’ve been learning? How does it relate back to what you already do every day?
- Practice Stephen Covey’s “5th Habit” and always “seek first to understand.” When we’re frustrated, slowing down, making time to reconsider, and leaning in to learn from others can all help.
It’s possible that one of the best, most practical suggestions I’ve ever gotten on this subject—one my business partner Paul Saginaw has been using for more than 40 years—came from back when we first opened the Deli in the ’80s. It goes like this: “When furious, get curious!”
I smile, still, every time I think about it. And, I can say with confidence all these years later, although it’s not part of any formal training we do at Zingerman’s, nearly everyone who has worked here for more than a few weeks has probably heard it. It works. People also learn to be curious by spending time in cultures that encourage curiosity. Now, though, I’m curious. Where did Paul learn it in the first place? Stay tuned. In the meantime, let me know what you learn about curiosity! While you’re doing that, I’m gonna see if I can find that darned Marguerite Duras quote!
