A short spoken piece advising leaders and teams to replace automatic judgment with curiosity. Recommends simple cues (e.g., sticky-note reminders), asking open questions, and an exercise to generate 20–21 alternative stories for why someone’s performance changed; argues these practices change how people are treated and improve decision-making in meetings.
How do we replace our judgment with curiosity? There are simple techniques to do this. One is write yourself a little reminder, put a little sticky on your computer that says be curious or ask questions. You'll be amazed how well that works. But especially in times when we're judging, we're in meetings, we can snowball into judgment really quickly. Let's say someone's performance is in decline immediately. They're lazy, they're stupid, they don't understand. They're a problem child. All it takes is one person to break that judgment and say maybe they're going through something. Can you go through the Exercise of writing 20 or 21 alternative stories of what could be happening? And all of a sudden we find ourselves talking about and treating that person differently. And it doesn't just come about people. It's also about decisions we're making at work as leaders. The more we start asking each other what if? Or what are the possibilities? We'll find ourselves doing that with our people. That when they come to us, instead of us correcting them and telling them that they're wrong, raising questions, believe it or not, simply having a little reminder to be curious is really important.
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