Tag: organizational culture
A caring reflection on a curious question
This all began, as so many good learnings are wont to do, with a question.
Last week I was talking for a while to Sarah Harris, the musician and caring creative force behind the band Dolly Creamer, whose music I wrote about near near the end of last week’s enews. She and I were sharing assorted stories while she had supper at the Roadhouse. Since Sarah is reading some of the stuff I’ve written, and I, in turn, have been listening to a lot of her music since we met at the Deli the week previous, there’s a whole lot of philosophical and artistic material for us to talk through.
As the conversation continued, we swapped learnings, trying to find philosophical framings for what we do and firmly agreeing, more than once, I think, that we both like to work a lot. I think it’s safe to say that Sarah and I would each align with what artist, sculptor, and author Anne Truitt writes: “We agree that work is the backbone of a properly conducted life, serving at once to give it shape and to hold it up. Of like mind, industrious by nature, we work even as we talk.”
As the conversation progressed, the two of us began talking about the import of curiosity. At some point, Sarah paused for a second and put her own curiosity into immediate practice by throwing an out-of-context, slightly off-kilter (in the best possible way) question at me. One minute we were talking about loving to learn and leadership, and then, out of the blue, she quietly asked me this:
What keeps you going?
It was, at first glance, a casual sort of question, a tiny bit of an aside asked seriously but gently, the result of a small shift in a smart and creative woman’s brain in the middle of a conversation that covered a couple dozen other topics that probably seemed far more important. It was a curious wondering-aloud that would have been all too easy to miss. Anne Truitt had it right about a half a century ago when she wrote, “Everything that happened was a matter of curiosity to be explored and examined with hearty directness.” And, sure enough, a casual, completely spontaneous conversation turned out to provide a positive prompt for some serious self-reflection, the result of which appears in this essay. Four simple words spoken quietly and wrapped up with a question mark launched a week of meaningful self-exploration.
Sarah’s question, to be quite honest, stumped me at first. What she was asking hadn’t really crossed my mind. Her question couldn’t have been any clearer, but it took me 10 days to find an answer. What follows is my first attempt to offer her a clearer, more coherent, and more helpful response than the “Wow, that’s a good question” and “I don’t really know” sort of stuff I stumbled through that evening.
The reality of my life is that—to state what has to be obvious to everyone reading this—I happily and eagerly do keep going, as I have for well over 40 years now. Still, simply doing is not, for me, a substitute for serious understanding. Which is why I’ve spent so much of the last week wondering:
- Why, indeed, do I keep going with such diligence and determination?
- What keeps me moving forward so consistently every day when there are 44 other directions I could easily alter my path to pursue?
- Why am I still excited to go to work every day after all these years when so many people I know would rather do anything but?
- Although “keeping going” is not on Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny list of 20 lessons to practice to resist the imposition of autocracy, it seems clear that if we don’t keep going, we lose democracy. Democracy may or may not die in darkness, but it definitely dies if the people who are part of it stop working hard to make it happen. So, how does one keep going in the face of autocratic adversity?
- What does keep me going, when all is said and done? Day in and day out, when coolers break, plans go awry, orders fail to show up, and leadership is difficult to do even moderately well, how do I keep pushing forward?
Approaching life with an abundance of curiosity in hand, as Sarah Harris also seems to do, I spent a fair bit of time turning her good question over in my mind. I started to sort out the answers through my usual research process. Reading always reveals interesting insights, and I almost always get my own thinking going by learning from others. It didn’t take me very long, though, to realize the absurdity of that approach. Other people’s inspiration, in this context, was pretty irrelevant. I mean, how in the heck was looking up other people’s answers to Sarah’s good question going to help me know why I keep going?
Self-reflection, it quickly became obvious, was really the only research I needed to do as I tried to ascertain an answer. I needed to do what Anne Truitt talked about: “contemplate all this with curiosity and wonder.” And that is indeed how I’ve spent a good part of the last week—wondering to myself, wandering through the back corners and creative crevices of my curious mind, making my best attempt to ascertain an answer. That sort of self-examination is not always easy work. As Truitt tells it, “The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one’s own most intimate sensitivity.”
My initial inclination is to answer Sarah’s question with a right-on response from another musician, a man who made his mark on a different genre and a different generation than Sarah. Pharoah Sanders was a free spirit who played free jazz, a saxophonist who set a high bar for any other aspiring jazz musician. Born 85 years ago this past week in Little Rock, Arkansas, Pharoah Sanders, quite simply, was something else! A lot like Anne Truitt and Sarah Harris, Sanders was, to my ear and eye, an artist driven by a lifelong creative quest and a commitment to making his art, all the while remaining determinedly true to himself.
Jon Pareles wrote the following in Pharoah Sanders’ New York Times obituary three years ago last month:
The sound Mr. Sanders drew from his tenor saxophone was a force of nature: burly, throbbing and encompassing, steeped in deep blues and drawing on extended techniques to create shrieking harmonics and imposing multiphonics. He could sound fierce or anguished; he could also sound kindly and welcoming.
When reviewing one of Sanders’ shows for The New York Daily News in the summer of 1977, music critic Stan Mieses wrote:
There was a moment Tuesday night when I felt like yelling out loud and launching my head through the ceiling—that’s the kind of feverish pitch that Pharoah Sanders and his group hit me. … They have to be seen and heard to be believed.
With his music, Pharoah Sanders seems to have attained what I’ve come to think of—thanks to the writing of creative business thinker Carol Sanders, who kept working until weeks before she died of ALS in her 80s last December—as Deep Understanding. He took his playing to places no one else had been, in ways that helped him to be himself and brought beauty to anyone who leaned in to listen. As the late, legendary Danish jazz journalist Boris Rabinowitsch noted in a 1977 review in the newspaper Politiken:
The music [Sanders] made … drew from the jazz tradition, but elevated the form so as to embrace gospel, soul, African folk, R&B and what would soon be deemed world music, weaving it all into a tapestry that spoke of African-American identity, spiritual realization and world peace. … It is the tone, its sonorous—and emotional, expressive possibilities, that Sanders has succeeded not only in cultivating … with a deep personal commitment, that today he himself stands out as one of jazz’s great individuals.
I share Sanders’ story here in part because more people ought to know about him, but mostly because my initial answer to Sarah’s question is what he said, simply and directly, in a January 2020 interview with The New Yorker:
If you’re in the song, keep on playing.
For me at least, what he said is so right-on that I can only smile, reread, and repeat. The eight words in Pharoah Sanders’ statement are essentially an honest answer to Sarah’s question. I have been deep in the song for decades now, determined to keep playing day in and day out! When you’re “in” whatever you do in that way every day, “What keeps you going?” doesn’t really come up. Upon further reflection, it occurred to me that Sarah answered her own question, at least partially, five years ago. This answer—“Just make your art!”—is in the inspiring song “Icicles” on her stripped-down debut, Best of Luck. I think it’s a remarkable, vulnerable, and insightful album. After all, as she accurately observes a few lines later in the song, “Your art made you!”
And much as I love Sarah Harris’ and Pharoah Sanders’ short and to-the-point statements of creative fact, I know full well that there must be more to the answer. I challenged myself to sort out and then share my answer to Sarah’s question. Not because my answer will necessarily bear any resemblance at all to yours—we all keep going, after all, for our own reasons—but because it’s a really good question and because it seems like something we would all do well to answer for ourselves.
Anne Truitt noted that the “truth of an intuitive leap is pure and straight.” For me, finding an answer to Sarah’s curious question was more of a slow, meandering mountain path than anything pure or straight. More like a Pharoah Sanders’ free jazz show than some corporate chatbot’s quick, off-the-shelf answer to a frequently asked question. Wandering, wondering, reflecting, writing, reading, and back through again about 18 times over the course of the last week.
Increased attention of this sort, I know from experience, nearly always unveils new evidence. And, sure enough, as soon as I started reflecting more meaningfully, clues began to crop up all over the place. Like Sarah’s question, the evidence arose out of the kind of wholly unplanned and completely unexpected interstitial events that unfold in all of our lives. If and when we’re paying attention, we can catch them like falling stars. There is, I believe, magical inspiration in those moments.
This past Monday morning was a turning point for me in understanding the answer to Sarah’s question. I had just arrived at the Roadhouse after working at home for a few hours. I grabbed a cup of Tree Town coffee and a glass of water. As I’ve done many hundreds of times now over the years, I plugged in my computer and opened my doc to continue working on this enews on the day of my usual “get-your-darned-draft-in” deadline.
Before I’d typed more than 20 words, I looked up and saw a customer for whom I have an enormous amount of respect. She’s a longtime Roadhouse regular, so that’s the first way I think of her. We met many years ago while I was pouring water at her table, the kind of encounter with an exceptional creative thinker that happens in the Ann Arbor ecosystem with surprising frequency. In the years since, I’ve come to see her as a scholar, a philosophically minded expert in global finance, a friend, a fellow Russian studies major, and a Russian speaker (her Russian is much better than mine these days) as well. She’s also a caring human who has accomplished amazing things in her life. She remains humble, determined, thoughtful, and joyful while overcoming a host of challenges. She is, for me, an inspiration and a source of wisdom who appreciates what we bake and cook as well as the caring, dignity-centered spaces we’ve worked so hard to create in the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses (ZCoB) over the years. From the outside looking in, it sure seems like she’s “in the song,” and, best I can tell from the outside looking in, she’s determined to keep playing.
That morning, this longtime guest had just finished a breakfast meeting with her minister, also an amazing human being and also, like her, a regular customer. Before I could really ask how she was doing, curious and caring soul that she is, she asked a question of me: “Are you writing your newsletter?” As I started to answer in the affirmative, she looked me in the eye and said with quiet gravity:
Keep writing. It makes a difference. Right now, more than ever. I read it every week, and I’m sure a lot of other people do, too.
I was touched, humbled, and inspired anew. Remembering that I had a handful of apricot pins with me that I had ordered for occasions just like this one, I reached into my shoulder bag and pulled one out to offer it to her as a gift, a small symbol of support in the challenging times she continues to work through in her own workplace with so much grace and determination. I began to explain what the apricot’s about, but since she reads this enews every week, she already knew about the apricot’s role as a positive symbol of dignity and democracy. “Thank you!” she said. “I have a bag I’m bringing with me to tough meetings. I’m gonna put this in there.”
After she left to go on with her day, I started to type again. One aspect of the answer to Sarah’s question was now immediately clear to me. There’s now no doubt in my mind that I keep going, in great part, because the work that I do for so much of every day makes a meaningful difference to people who mean a lot to me.
Before I got even two sentences into the writing, that first observation was confirmed anew when a second guest walked over to say hello. He had a big smile on his face, and I sensed that he was someone I knew but wouldn’t be able to place immediately. Happily for me, he reintroduced himself. His younger sister has been part of the ZCoB off and on for about 20 years now, and he himself has been a customer pretty much since we opened the Deli in 1982. He proceeded to thank me profusely for providing a positive place for his sister to work, and also for all we have done in the community over the years. I thanked him back for his support and assured him, from the heart, that it makes a huge difference to know that the work we do really does resonate. “It’ll be 44 years in March,” I shared. “Wow! You look like a young man still,” he said. And, with a big smile, he added, “I guess when you do what you love, it keeps you young!”
Having made both of our mornings better, he then headed off to have breakfast while I got my head back into writing, reminded for the second time in something like six minutes that we really do make a difference. My energy increased, I started clicking typewriter keys, much in the way, I imagine, Pharoah Sanders did with keys of his saxophone back in the ’60s and ’70s. Sure enough, if you’re in the song, keep playing.
I managed to make it about two paragraphs further before yet another regular customer came over to say hi. This is the amazing advantage of the “edge” that I wrote about last month—spending time in spots where customers, coworkers, and others can just come up and tell you things that they wouldn’t likely seek you out to share. Anyway, though this customer is far less famous than the first guest I got to talking to, she is nevertheless remarkable. She retired long ago, but she keeps playing her song happily—last year, she treated herself to a long-dreamed-of cruise that crossed much of the world over the course of about six months. That morning, she shared with me that she’ll soon be moving into independent living. She explained the thinking behind the move and shared what she was looking forward to. It turns out she’s going to teach watercolor painting to the other folks in her new place. Her determination to stay positive and curious, and to continue contributing to her community, is an inspiration. Very different life story, but the song remains very much the same. If you’re in the song, keep on playing!
This last customer’s story gave me a second clue in my search for an answer to Sarah’s question: Whether I’m reading, listening, looking, or interacting with someone in another way, spending time with people who are “in the song” and “keep playing” inspires me to do the same! Together, we create our imperfect version of what Anne Truitt once called “experiments in space, color, and form,” a beautiful way, I might add, to imagine our lives.
So, after all that, what does keep me going? I’ve already shared two important parts of my answer:
- Being determined to make a difference
- Hanging around with other people who keep going when the going gets tough
Here’s half a dozen other pieces of my answer:
Honoring my drive to learn. Back on September 10, Sarah Harris posted a newsletter piece that included, amongst a host of other good thoughts, a photo she’d taken of some words—possible pieces of songs, poems, or just journal prompts—that she’d thrown down on a white legal pad while reflecting over the course of the previous week. The caption under the photo reads “none of these lines were used lol.” That, though, is no longer true since I’m about to use one of them here and now. The second set of words on Sarah’s photographed page says, “U ain’t gonna find it by doin the same old thing.” I know for sure that that bit of wisdom is totally true for me, too. Learning from folks like Pharoah Sanders, Sarah Harris, Anne Truitt, and a host of others whose names I don’t even know is a very significant part of my answer to Sarah’s question. No doubt about it, learning keeps me going. The way I have designed my life and the way I try to live it have pretty much guaranteed that I rarely go more than a few minutes without learning something new!
Immersing myself in self-study. As Pharoah Sanders said, “Everything comes from within. It all comes from inside. [I] try to bring the best of myself or the best quality of myself and try to grow and try to develop and be a man of quality.” I completely concur. I have been working to study myself since somewhere around the time I turned 30. That study—which I wrote about extensively in Managing Ourselves, and which is evidenced, I suppose, by this essay—will not end until I leave consciousness at some unknown date down the road. I am not alone in this self-exploration—it seems a common theme for most people who are “in the song.” Though Anne Truitt made her name as a sculptor and artist, she created a whole new role for herself through journaling. In 1984, when she was already in her 60s, Truitt published her first book, called Daybook: The Journal of an Artist, a collection of pieces taken (as was Sarah Harris’s above-mentioned essay) taken from her written reflections. Over the years that followed, Truitt continued to publish her private thoughts, which evolved into a series of highly recommended books. She took on the challenge as a way to better understand herself. As critic and essayist Megan O’Grady writes, “Journaling also allowed [Truitt] to refine her sense of purpose in making art.” It has, without question, done the same for me. Journaling has helped me to face my fears, find focus, learn and grow, and go forward even when I don’t feel like it.
Figuring out how to make my art without losing my heart. Writer Toni Cade Bambara says that “a people entrenched in another people’s fiction is an endangered people!” I’ll take this beautiful statement further: A person entrenched in other people’s fiction is an endangered person. I am determined to figure out what it means to be true to myself and to make a difference for others, without losing who I am, to own my life in ways that are aligned with my essence and my ethics. The same, it seems, is true for Anne Truitt, Sarah Harris, and Pharaoh Sanders.
Noticing more, seeing more, tasting more, hearing more. This entire essay—plus all the reflection that went with it and the work that will come from it—came out of one standalone question in the middle of an hour-long conversation that wasn’t really at all about the subject at hand. These sorts of learning opportunities, I’ve come to see, are all around us all the time. With that in mind, I spend much of my day prospecting, mining for metaphorical gold, seeking tiny snippets of stuff that have significance far beyond what any observer looking only at the surface would ever see. I hope to be like Pharoah Sanders, who once said in a 2020 interview in The New Yorker: “I listen to things that maybe some guys don’t … listen to the waves of the water. Train coming down. Or I listen to an airplane taking off.”
Continuing to grow as a person. This is what Anne Truitt wrote about and practiced. It’s what Sarah Harris sings and writes about regularly—on her album Purple Bonnet Phase, she sings what I see as true: “You are always becoming.” This is also the work that Pharoah Sanders did so well for decades. He continued to evolve throughout his 82 years. When an interviewer asked Sanders, “Do you feel it is important to keep searching, and possibly changing?” he offered a response that seems right to me: “How would I create without changing?”
Perpetually finding curiosity. Curiosity is, in a sense, what got this whole conversation and self-reflection going in the first place. I am endlessly fascinated by the virtual and virtuous cycle that I wrote about last winter, the overlay and interplay of history, theory, and practice. Because we have created a workplace in which that framework is at the center of what we do every day, I am rarely more than a few minutes removed from it. For me, it is an inspiring source of infinitely renewable energy. And, I’ve come to understand, almost anything I start to study in depth will pretty quickly draw me in!
One more thought came to mind as my curiosity kept bringing me back to Sarah’s question: Effective energy management is definitely needed to “keep playing.” I’ve written a lot about this in Secrets #20 and #21 in Being a Better Leader. In brief, though, anyone who is able to hold course, to keep going as Anne Truitt, Pharoah Sanders, and Sarah Harris have all done, must have some effective ways to manage their energy. For me, that means spending nearly all of my time in energy-building activities like those I’ve listed above and very little in work that drains me.
All of this, of course, is only the start of my attempt to answer Sarah’s question. I will continue to ponder it all in the weeks, months, and years to come. Which is, I realize now, another reason I keep going—because when one does the work in this way, the work will never be “done.” Living a good life isn’t something one can cross off a list. If you’re in the song, as I pretty clearly am, continuing to play my music is just what I do. And, I have come to believe, if one plays well enough and long enough, we can arrive at what I wrote about poet Nikki Giovanni after she died last December: Deep Understanding of Ourselves. How well will we do it? Only time will tell.
Though music is her main focus, Sarah Harris also works part-time at a small craft brewpub in Los Angeles so that, like most musicians I know, she can keep current with her bills while crafting the art she cares about so much. In a Dolly Creamer newsletter essay entitled “Ready is not a feeling, it is a decision,” Sarah noted that she tends bar two nights a week. Here’s her message in case you find yourself in L.A., wanting to talk with this curious artist and collaborate on ways to keep ourselves going as we walk together through whatever we are walking through together right now:
[I’ll] be at Solarc every Tuesday and Wednesday night so come by and hangout we can talk shop. There we can change the world. And here too. 🙂
Thank you.
You are a miracle don’t forget.
It could well be that the answer to “What keeps you going?” was, as is so often the case, already embedded in the question itself. One good way to keep going—for me and maybe for Sarah and you as well—is to hang around with other people who also keep going. Spending time with folks who keep pushing through adversity, who stay focused even when the world around them feels like it’s coming apart, is more reason to keep playing when others head off to do other things. I learn whenever I lean into even small bits of time with people who keep pushing themselves in healthy, positive, and self-reflective ways. Their answers and, of course, their questions, inspire more often than not. Together, we conspire to contemplate our compatible curiosities, we support and share and encourage each other to put one foot in front of the other, and, in our world at Zingerman’s at least, put another plate of great food on the table, pull another loaf of artisan bread from the oven or pack another box to send to someone special in some city or small town a long way from where we live.
Sarah Harris summed all this up wonderfully well in her newsletter piece, in a straight-to-the-point way that’s both true and true to who she is:
We are breathing into the worry and we are showing up to the moment as imperfect and sloppy. … WE ARE HERE AND ALIVE AND ITS A FUCKING MIRACLE.
Anne Truitt, Sarah Harris, Pharoah Sanders, me, you, your neighbor, and your Aunt Nancy, we each have our own way to keep going. All of these approaches, though, seem to be some variation on an endlessly variable but always energizing theme. Which is why I’m now curious to hear what you think. Here’s what I want to know:
- How would you answer Sarah’s question?
- What, after all is said and not really done, keeps you going?
In closing, I want to say again that I appreciate you all enormously. You help keep me going. And I never take that for granted! Here’s to good things to come! As Pharaoh Sanders said in an interview with @ All About Jazz:
I just love to work. I would rather work three hundred and something days out of the year. I would rather be working. They don’t know. I love playing. Then I can really get my music together. … I want to play as long as I have my horn, a long, long time.
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!