Ten Principles
Being curious is a way of being. The essence is captured in ten principles.
Move toward not knowing
We are all born curious. But that gets worked out of us fairly quickly. ‘Those who ask get passed over’ and curious minds are told to take a walk. Measurement is knowledge and knowledge is key. Knowledge can be power, but the awareness of what you do not know is wisdom. And that is what we need for the complexity of today. To realise connection and progress, we will need to lean on sources other than our ‘knowing’. It begins with learning how to find the position of ‘not knowing’ within ourselves.
Find the question that lives
Imagine you could generate a better answer to your most complex challenge by asking that one resonant question. Where would you begin? Throughout life, we learn all kinds of scripts for solving problems. We generally focus on ‘solving’, without ever having reached the root of the problem. To get there, we need to search for the question alive in the organisation where we work or the system in which we live. How to get there is something that can be learned. An important beginning.
Gather difference
By far the greatest limitation of our wisdom is our hunger for uniformity. You know it well — that delightful feast of recognition. The other side of that feast is that we feel compelled to blow apart the other’s truth the moment our own certainty comes under pressure from compelling arguments. But what if your truth is merely a perspective? And growing wiser has everything to do with the degree to which we expand it with entirely different perspectives? Gathering difference is a condition for progress.
Ask forward
‘The tendency not to ask further exists everywhere in the world and leads nowhere everywhere.’ Our questions are generally rooted in reactivity, distrust and scarcity. Most of the questions we ask reveal only a narrow slice of reality and ignore the territory of possibility. Asking forward is a way of questioning in which the potential of the future is set in motion — in connection with the other. In my podcast elsewhere on this website, you can hear what that sounds like.
Listen into being
Between what the other says and what we hear lies interpretation. We think we have heard the other, but without realising it, we are listening to our own interpretation of what was said. As long as your own beliefs form the windows through which you listen, you are unconsciously standing in the way of connection and progress. The art is to listen in such a way that the other can emerge with all their wisdom. This calls for an awareness of different levels of listening — with the deepest level as the aspiration.
Start with the system
Much of our energy leaks away in hard work — only to find that what we thought we had solved reappears in a different form a few months later. That is because we usually work on a challenge with people who have no direct relationship with the problem. We work for others instead of with those who are part of the system surrounding the challenge. How to arrive at a meaningful representation of that system is essential in investigative leadership.
Honour the whole
In groups and organisations, the norm gives direction to how we deal with complex issues. But for lasting answers, we will need to bring ourselves as human beings onto the work floor. Because meaning emerges in and between people. As does the direction that connects us. Learning to see and listen to what happens between us is an important quality. And the much-needed bell with which the moment of shared meaning can be marked.
Suspend judgement
‘Every judgement is a tragic expression of an unmet need.’ With violence — literal or figurative — as a frequent and painful result. We often do not recognise judgement as a packaged need. And we are unable to make contact with the old need that still lives within us. Investigative leaders recognise judgement as a place where something has been left behind. Instead, they explore the underlying need. With the far-reaching alternative to judgement being the request.
Make sensitivity S.M.A.R.T.
Work is human work, and people carry whole human lives with them. Joy, fear — everything that happens to each of us. We regularly try to park what is personal in order to be ‘properly’ at work. In doing so, we forget that eighty percent of our communication is non-verbal. And that we cannot hide ourselves, even if we truly wanted to. By becoming aware of our sensitivity and learning to draw on it consciously and skilfully, we can considerably increase the value of our presence.
Bend reaction into response
‘Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response,’ Viktor Frankl taught us. When we are able to observe what we have until then taken for granted as truth, we can arrive at new meaning. This calls for listening inward and outward — simultaneously. The true art of investigative living is to bend ‘reacting from the old’ toward ‘responding to what the here and now asks of us’. In this way, we can live our way toward connection and wisdom. In a permanent state of response-ability.