The young lady entered the conference room at the behest of the VP of Product Development. She presented herself well, from her perfect business suit to her direct communication style. As the VP launched into a description of the new product – an application designed to serve industrial toxicology analysts – the impressive young lady took copious notes on her yellow note pad, nodding her head to indicate understanding, and looking at the VP earnestly whenever she was not writing. When the VP was done speaking, the young lady asked “is that all?” and when informed that indeed, it was, she left the room quietly and shut the door behind her.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” said the VP in exasperation.
“How many technical writers on staff?” I asked
“Three more,” she said, as she rubbed her eyebrows and slowly shook her head. “And none of the others would have asked any more questions than this writer asked.” The VP (let’s call her Karen – all these pronouns are making me dizzy) leaned back in her chair and asked me “Is this the kind of thing you can fix?”
Karen is dealing with an issue that is frequently experienced by product managers and developers. The people who are responsible for conveying the message about the product – the images, the copy, the education – never quite get to the bottom of what it is the user of the product cares about. The advertising folks may be able to make great images and draft snappy copy, but their message doesn’t sell. And sell is the only thing their message is required to do.
From a consulting standpoint, yes, there are things we can do to “fix” this issue. We’ll work on processes, customer awareness, and technical knowledge. We’ll assess the strengths and weaknesses of their art director to identify needed improvements. If the company is dealing with an advertising agency instead of in-house creative, we’ll spend some time with the account exec and creative team and see if improving the direction will make a difference, or if it’s a new agency that is needed. In the end they will have a more consistent and effective advertising, marketing, and promotion effort and they will sell more products.
But there is one thing I can’t fix. No adult can fix it for any other adult. When it’s missing, it costs businesses a lot of money. When it’s missing, people are actively cheating themselves out of the fun they could be having at work. And it’s nearly impossible to train.
Where the heck did half the work force’s curiosity go?
Curiosity is what was missing from that first meeting. If curiosity had been present, the writer would have been asking questions faster than Karen could talk. She might have even been somewhat annoying with all her questions – which would have been just fine thank you. She would have asked if she could be trained on the new product – even if she couldn’t fully operate it, at least she could picture it. She would have dashed back to her desk to start doing internet research to determine whether anyone else offered a similar product. She would have inquired whether she could speak to customers about the product and how it might help them. She might have asked if she could go observe a customer at work. Lest you think I am making a point about marketing departments, please note. Lack of curiosity damages a business from every department.
A good scientist knows that it isn’t enough to find one or two supporting pieces of evidence. You must try to invalidate your own arguments. You must do the work of uncovering multiple supporting pieces of evidence and multiple contradictory pieces of evidence, and then try to reconcile the differences through further experimentation and testing. That’s curiosity. This discipline is rarely applied to business. All too often business people rely on what worked in the past, what they feel in their gut, or the one piece of evidence they gathered by calling on a sympathetic supporter or reading a sympathetic article. That’s not curiosity – that’s hubris.
A good basketball player knows that it isn’t enough to find one unerring way to make a 3 point shot. They have to consider and be challenged by every possible move that could get in their way – and this has to happen in practice, because if it happens in the game and you’re taken by surprise you’ll miss your shot. It’s curiosity at the bottom of this behavior, and it’s discipline that follows up on the curiosity.
Merriam Webster Unabridged (2007) defines curiosity as 1) desire to know a: inquisitive interest in others’ concerns : b: interest leading to inquiry.
A common excuse for lack of curiosity in the workplace is that “we just don’t have time. Things are moving too fast. We have to make decisions and move on.” The need to make decisions fast mustn’t supplant the importance of investigation. And in the truly curious, it can’t. If they are really that busy (most people aren’t, by the way), the truly curious will time-shift and do their investigation at night. They will find ways to automate administrative and managerial tasks and create space to indulge their curiosity. The truly curious don’t let anything get in the way of learning more about, well, whatever it is they need to learn more about.
If that sounds like a lot of work that nobody has any time for, you’re missing the point. If we spend all of our time making unthinking decisions, shuffling mounds of paper, attending eons of meetings, and wading through acres of politics, that’s not fun. What makes work fun is our curiosity. It’s curiosity that creates the opportunity for creativity. It’s curiosity that fuels brain cells starved on a diet of the bland repetitiveness of rote thinking. It’s curiosity that gets us interested, gets us motivated, gets us noticed, gets us promoted.
The paradox is that the truly curious rarely get burnt out on work (though they may get burnt out on a particular job or manager). The incurious complain of morale issues, suffer from lack of recognition, and most horrifying of all, allow themselves to become bored.
If we weren’t tackling the problem starting right now, the writer with the yellow notepad and perfect suit would likely find herself rewriting the promotional brochure five or six times, each time wondering why the product development people can’t make up their minds, or can’t do a better job of describing the product they made. Karen (the VP) would eventually give up, thinking that perhaps her expectations were too high, perhaps her dreams of customer empathic copy were unrealistic (they aren’t).
I’m not sure why some people are more curious than others, because I believe we all are born with the same capacity for curiosity. But I am sure of this. Ultimately, only curiosity saves the company. Everything else is just for show.
(c) 2008. Andrea M. Hill
