#44 Endless Curiosity

You're listening to the Proteus Leader Show with Erika Andersen, where you'll get practical tools and insights for leading, managing, and staying ready for the future. Erika is the founding partner of Proteus, a firm that focuses uniquely on leader readiness. A nationally known executive coach and bestselling author, you may already know her as one of the most popular leadership bloggers on Forbes.com. Ready for something you can use today? Here's Erika.

Hello everybody and welcome back to the Proteus Leader Show. My guest today is Simon Brown, Chief Learning Officer of Novartis and co-author of a wonderful new book, The Curious Advantage. In conversation with Simon and his team over the past few months, I've come to understand how strongly they feel about curiosity as a key element in business, in relationships, and and in learning. And I thought it'd be hugely valuable for all of you to hear about Simon's insights and experiences in this realm. Welcome to the show, Simon.

Thank you, Erika. Thrilled to be here.

Yes, me too. Since I share your belief about the importance of curiosity, as you know, I just can't wait to have this conversation with you. I'm very curious about—

You and me both. Yep.

Okay, so let's get started. The first question I want to ask you is, in The Curious Advantage, you talk about curiosity as being, quote, the greatest driver of value in the digital age. So can you tell us more about why you believe that's true?

Yeah, absolutely. And maybe to answer that, if we start by going back a bit in time of when this wasn't the case. So if we go certainly Industrial Revolution, but actually carrying on almost probably to the present day in many organizations, when we hired someone brought them into an organization, we didn't want someone who brought new ideas. We didn't want someone who questioned how to do things. You wanted someone who could perform a process or a task over and over again in a quality sort of repetitive way, but not to deviate from that task. And, you know, our manufacturing lines, the Industrial Revolution was built on that sort of repetition of the same things over and over again. And that worked and was successful for many organizations for a very long time. But then enter the digital age and where we are today, and this is probably even more so with what we're seeing with the pandemic at the moment as well. We're seeing uncharted territory, we're seeing things that you can't look at how has this always been done. You can't go to the expert who has been doing this for 10 years and can say, you know, this is exactly what you do, you do step 1, step 2, step 3. There's so much unknown that we need people to be asking questions, and we need people to be curious to test out and experiment. And that was why in our research for the book and in our thinking for the book, we felt actually to be able to navigate in this digital age, what you need is people who are curious, who can be testing out, experimenting, trying things, finding what works, pivoting based on that, and through all of that, finding the path forward and finding the way through. You can't bring yesterday's ideas and just apply them over and over again.

That's a great framing. I completely agree with it, and I've seen it's It's a combination of everything you're saying, that everything's flattening out, speeding up. And as I was listening to you talking about, you know, the industrial age and when it was just, okay, people on assembly lines and people doing the same things over and over again, the same thing is true of hierarchies, I think. In those kinds of industrial age organizations, it made sense to have, okay, I talk to my boss and they talk to their boss and they talk. And so if I want to talk to somebody who works or another part of the organization has to go all the way up the chain and all the way back down the chain, right? So it seems like curiosity has really affected that as well, kind of management and organizational structures. Do you see that?

Yes, because— and I guess this ties in then to our culture within Novartis. So we have an aspiration around a culture that is inspired, curious, and unbossed. And unbossed is around servant leadership, around recognizing that the answer probably resides in the team, and it's the role of the leader not to say this is the answer, but to bring the answer out from the diverse team where you end up with a much better solution. So what we see is within that culture framing, actually curiosity and unbossed go together in terms of the empowerment of the team, and also the leader setting an environment where people can be curious, that they can try things out, they can experiment, they can speak up and share their opinion. And that then perpetuates the curiosity. So it's a mixture of the behavior of the manager and the leader to create that psychological safety that people can be curious, and also empowering people, which is where the link to sort of, I guess, taking— not sort of taking out lines of management, but allowing people the freedom to be empowered to make decisions. That's the difference. And that with the pandemic, I mean, that's been hugely valuable to be able to react very quickly to what we've seen by having that empowerment. people are able to just try things, experiment, and react and support our associates.

Yeah, that's great. So leaders really have to support, create, support, reinforce that environment of speed, of curiosity, of how can we do this differently, what do we need now. Yeah, that's great.

Exactly.

So what are— let's go to the other side. What are some of the problems that you see in business caused by the lack of curiosity?

So there's a— we've got a podcast that's linked to the book, and we were chatting with Chris Meyer, who's a futurologist, if I say that right. He's founder of the Monitor Group, and he was talking about one of the challenges if you're not curious as an organization, and he likened it to an analogy of an anthill and a Big Mac. So he said, if you're, if you're an anthill full of millions of ants and someone nearby drops a Big Mac as they're walking past, suddenly you have a food source. And all of the ants swirl down and they build their chains to go to the Big Mac and pick off a bit of food and bring it back to the anthill. And that's your rigorous process then that is delivering you what you need. It's bringing the food back to the anthill. But then one day it rains and the Big Mac washes away. So the question then is, do you continue with the process, the thing that always brought you the food back, and keep going back to the spot where the Big Mac was? Only it's not there, but you keep doing the same thing because it's the way you've always done it? Or are you curious and you send off the ants in all directions exploring and testing out different things and finding where's the next source of food? And ideally you do that while the food is there so that when it does wash away, you've explored lots of different avenues. I think that's where the difference between curiosity is— you're constantly looking for the next thing and the next source of food versus we've got something that works, there's a huge pile of food there, let's just keep going back to that and let's get really efficient at going back to that, and then one day suddenly it's washed away and you weren't ready for it because you weren't curious to explore.

Wow, that's a great analogy, and boy, we've all really seen that a lot in the pandemic, right? Like, I've observed with some of our clients, they made the necessary pivots because they were curious. They were like, oh, how do we need to do this now to satisfy our customers? How do we need to do this now to keep our people safe. And some people just, they just kept going for the Big Mac and the Big Mac wasn't there anymore.

Yep, yep, exactly. It's like if we keep doing it, eventually, eventually it will be there because it's always worked in the past. So eventually it will come good.

But we might all die of starvation before it actually comes back, you know.

Exactly, exactly.

And what, what kind of— let's dig into this a little bit more. So what— I'm sure you've seen organizations that have curiosity as a core element and that don't. How would you characterize those organizations that aren't curious? What do they feel like? What do they look like?

So I guess I'm fortunate that all of the organizations I've directly worked with have been curious. So I guess maybe turn it around into what we see as curiosity and what we're encouraging, and maybe where we came from, which was maybe less so. So I asked the question to our CEO Vas Narasimhan around why has it been hard to move towards being a curious organization? Because as a medicines company, we should be curious to be constantly discovering new medicines. But actually, of our 3 traits around curious, inspired, and unbossed, arguably the curious one was the one that was slowest for us to get traction on and one of the hardest that we've got. And in sort of asking why was it so difficult? So we found that curiosity was probably the hardest of the 3 dimensions of our culture— uninspired, curious, and unbossed— in terms of starting to get traction on. And when I asked Vas Narasimhan, our CEO, why he felt that was, because we should be a curious company, discovering medicines, looking at which molecules will work and help patients, but we'd come from a place, I guess, where there was a an expectation that you would always know the answer. So almost a sort of perfectionist culture that because everyone was very bright and, you know, huge depth of knowledge that enabled us to make these great scientific discoveries, that you would know the answer to anything. And that sort of manifested itself in huge PowerPoint decks where you would have enormous appendices in case you got asked the question, you would be able to show that you knew the answer because somewhere in the appendix you had the answer to any question that was asked. And so that sort of stifled that curiosity or that ability to ask questions and perhaps be seen to not know the answer because you're asking questions, and to even then put that curiosity into action to actually try something. If that didn't work, there wasn't the acceptance around failure, which is another key dimension we see in being curious, is you need to accept that that requires experimentation, and experimentation doesn't always result in a successful outcome. So, which again is a bit diverse because taking a medicine to market, you know, often those aren't all successful that we discover along the way, that not all of them do what is required. So there is an inherent not everything making it, but still somehow previously we had this thing where it wasn't good to be seen to be failing. So in our move towards being much more curious now, It's having that psychological safety to be able to try to experiment, to question, to wonder, and that you don't need to actually have the answers. It's the curiosity to go and find the answer that's the important thing.

Oh, that's lovely. So you've already kind of started to answer my third question, so let's just keep heading down that path. I, you know, we always promise that we'll give our listeners practical tips and insights, so I'm sure people are thinking as they're listening to this, well, so how can I become more curious? If I'm a leader, how can I help my people become more curious on a day-to-day basis? So what would you advise?

Yeah, so that's a very nice link to recently just published a book called The Curious Advantage, and in there we have a model that we call the 7 Cs, which is 7 things that you can do coincidentally beginning with the word C, and we did fit that to work, but it's a very effective model to help people to be more curious. And in there we also cover, as a leader, how can you be a curious leader? And that 7 Cs model, it starts with context. So it's around understanding the context that you're in and the context that you want to be curious about, so that you can be focused around your curiosity and the questions that you want to ask. Then it goes to community. So who's the community that can help you in that curiosity? So who are the experts? Who are the guides? Who are the people that can support you as you go through that? All of that generates a lot of information, so then it requires curation in narrowing it down to the things that are meaningful to help you in what it is that you're curious about. Then we apply creativity. So that's the sort of what-if questions. What if we did this? What if we did that? How can we test this? And asking those questions is great, but then there needs to be action, and the action comes through the next C, which is construction. So putting it into practice, experimenting, testing it out, finding out what works. Once you've done that and put it into action, you then need to apply criticality, the 6th C. So looking at what worked, what didn't work, what were the biases maybe that I brought that will influence my thinking, and how do I remove those biases to really, really understand what happened. And going through those 6, that then the research tells us generates confidence. And through that, the confidence, even if it didn't work, the fact that you've tried, you've experimented, you've been curious, that generates the confidence to then try further. And so the 7th C of confidence actually drives back to the first one, because the more confident you are, you can go back then and ask more curious questions, be more curious, and go back through the C's. So in terms of practical things to put into practice around it, that 7 Cs model is designed to try and help people to guide their curiosity in a way that is effective.

That's wonderful. I love your explanation of it. The 7 Cs, I have to admit, was my favorite part of the book. I loved it. And hearing your explanation of it was really— I love things that combine practicality and exploration, you know, because sometimes people think of practical as just as kind of what you were saying at the beginning of the interview, do the same thing, do it the same way. But to practically explore and engage yourself in the universe around you is so wonderful, and I love the 7 Cs as a mechanism for doing that. So, so thank you so much.

There's so much we can be curious about that you need to narrow it down really and target it into the right thing rather than aimless curiosity across anything.

Yeah, I like the step of curation. So, so, um, thank you so much, Simon. I feel— I mean, I would love to just have a couple of hours to have this, and I always promised this would be quick, and, you know, and this has been both thought-provoking and practical, which is marvelous. So listeners, if you're interested in finding out more about The Curious Advantage and the work Simon and his co-authors are doing, I encourage you to go to Sorry, I encourage you to go to curiousadvantage.com. So thank you so much, Simon.

Thank you, Erika. It's been a pleasure joining you.

Yeah, and to find out more about how Proteus supports leaders to be more curious, you can go to proteusleader.com/topics and select Be Bad First. So thank you everybody for listening, and until next time, here's to creating the life You truly want.

We hope you're feeling better equipped to create the career, the business, and the life you want. For more insights and tools for leadership and management, join us at theproteusleader.com. Have an excellent day, and thanks for listening.