146 | The Power of Curiosity at Work | Scott McInnes & Joe Lalley

At Inspiring Change, we help our clients build work cultures that bring out the best in their people. We created this podcast to share real stories and insights from those who are shaping better workplaces every day. So grab a cuppa and pop in your earbuds wherever you are. You're very welcome to the Building Better Cultures podcast. We're excited to have you with us. Hello there and welcome to this episode of the Building Better Cultures podcast with me, Scott McInnes. Really, really nice to have you back and thanks for listening. Before we get into today's guest, my usual little ask, we do put a bit of effort into these and bringing you really good guests and really good content and hopefully advice and things that you can take away and just implement because I kind of pride myself on these being a bit practical. So hopefully you do get a bit of that from these podcasts. I would love you please just to give us a little rating. It doesn't have to be 4 or 5 stars, but that would be nice. That's like a subliminal message. And a little, a little message underneath would be fabulous as well. So whatever channel you're listening on, please a little rating and a review would be fantastic. Thank you so much. I often think, and we, of course, you know, Inspiring Change, we do a lot of work in the culture space. And it's really easy for cultures and organizations to become staid and stuck in a rut. And you find that people are like, "Well, this is the way we've always done this. And sure, why should we change it? And what difference is it really going to make? And we've always done it this way. Why would we do it differently?" I'm kind of with Picasso. Years ago, Picasso said, "Children are full of creativity. The challenge is keeping them being creative when they become adults." And the same is true of what I want to talk to today's guest about, which is curiosity. The idea of being a little bit curious. And it's funny that when I think of that word, I think back to my sister when she was about maybe 3, I think, who thought to herself, "I wonder what would happen if I stuck this pair of scissors into this electrical plug socket. And of course, that didn't end all that well. She didn't die or anything, but I think she got a bit of a fright and she didn't do it again. So for me, just that whole idea of curiosity, of trying things new, of trying things different, of seeing if they work, of experimenting, is kind of lost. So I'm delighted to have today's guest on. He's based in New York. His name is Joe Lally. He is somebody who has spent a lot of time in the whole area of design thinking, in the whole area of innovation, and more recently wrote a book called How Curiosity Can Transform Your Career, Your Team, and Your Organization. And that's hopefully what we're going to talk about today and give you some really practical tips. No pressure there, Joe, to take away from the end of the pod. So, Joe, you're very welcome on.

Yeah, I'm happy to be here.

Big question, first of all, how do you define curiosity?

Yeah, I keep it really simple. I think curiosity is the simple act of wanting to go from not knowing to knowing. And I think curiosity tends to be sort of overblown and people will say, encourage people to ask the most visionary questions and the biggest question that can lead to the biggest answers or what will this look like in 5 years? The simple act of just not knowing and wanting to know, I think that is curiosity and it opens up so many doors because it's opening end it. You can find out the why behind it. You can find out the what behind it. So, that's how I define it. That's how I talk about it a lot in the book.

And it's that idea. I love that idea of kind of wondering, well, could it be different? And for me, I spend a lot of time talking to leadership groups. And one topic or theme that keeps coming up is that idea of self-awareness, of actually just being aware that actually there might be a different way to do this.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I had an experience with a boss years ago that sort of, it's shaped a lot of how I think about curiosity now. So I was, you know, pretty far into my career. I felt like I was climbing the ladder, doing pretty well, and I started a new job and was, my first task was to put together and present my roadmap to the CEO. So I spent the first 3 weeks of my job there speaking with all the internal stakeholders, learning what had been done in the past. I put together this amazing slide deck. I was super excited, thought everything— thought I had kind of checked every box and was ready. And we get to the second idea in the roadmap and he stops me and he says, is this what our customers want? And it was this moment where I had to make a decision because I thought, you know, is this a trap? So I took a chance and I actually admitted that I didn't know because I had never spoken to customers. I had never even considered if they wanted this thing. So I admitted it and his next question assured me that I had not made a bad decision. He said, well, how might we find out? And then we had this curious conversation about, well, how could we learn if our customers wanted this thing? So that, that was a rare experience, at least at that point in my career. And it shaped a lot because he just didn't know and he wanted to know. He was a little upset with me that I hadn't done my homework, but we still had a productive conversation from it.

Probably the biggest thing, and I suspect because you're now still telling that story a couple of decades later, is that you learned something from, from that experience.

Yeah.

Which was to maybe think a little more before putting that stuff together, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you mentioned in the opening about, you know, doing things the way they, they've always been done because that's the way they've always been done. You know, I did everything in terms of my preparation the way I'd always seen it be done. I talked with all the people internally and I just based my recommendations on that. I didn't ask why or dig further.

And I think the other thing that really chimed with me when you were telling that story was just that whole idea of psychological safety. And I was actually, I was only this morning, I was writing a workshop for a client on psychological safety and referencing Amy Edmondson's work, the Harvard professor, who I called the queen mother of psychological safety. Because of course, curiously, Curiosity and psych safety must sit very closely together, mustn't they? Because there must have been some level of psychological safety for you in front of the CEO to say, you know what, you're right, I didn't ask actually, rather than trying to BS your way through the meeting and then worry about trying to fix it later.

Yeah. I mean, in that one question, he showed me that there was psychological safety. I actually didn't know if there was or didn't even think about it beforehand. But he showed it. And I think curiosity and psychological safety go hand in hand. I think if you don't have psychological safety, it's unlikely people will ask curious questions. They'll ask questions that people mostly know the answers to. And psychological safety is, it's a business requirement. I think, you know, sometimes it gets talked about as this sort of soft skill, but without it, you are creating the same things that you've always created. People are afraid to experiment or take risks. So it's a business problem if you don't have it.

Yeah. As I say, in planning that session this morning, I was only writing in one of the slides, psychological safety is not a soft skill, it's a business imperative or a performance imperative. If you are not constantly looking at new and different and better ways to do things, then you're probably going backwards because your competitors are definitely doing that, you would think.

Yeah, it's a differentiator for sure.

When I think about that idea of the world of work and how we work today, what are you seeing or what have you seen in terms of how curiosity can help us?

Yeah, I think what I've observed throughout my career, and there were ups and downs in terms of my curiosity, and I also interviewed a lot of senior-level people for my book, and I started to see patterns in successful companies, companies that maybe were stuck, and it had a lot to do with the types of questions. And I ended up starting to categorize these questions. So, one that I have seen a lot and I have also done is what I tend to call the hero question. And picture yourself in a meeting where a team is kind of kicking around ideas, asking lots of questions, moving through some of the potentials about why and what and what if. And then somebody says, well, you know, what will this look like in 3 years? And it's this sort of visionary question that, wow, that person is thinking so far ahead of us. But if you haven't figured out what this is yet, then what it looks like in 3 years is sort of, it's a poorly timed question. So I think, you know, really thinking about what does it look like now and why does it look like that? I think that's really important in work. There's another one that I've seen that can have really negative effects. I called it the power move question. And it's usually a question that a leader will ask of somebody who's a lower level than them, ask it in a public forum where they're not in a good position to respond, also with the knowledge that they may not know the answer. And it's this sort of like, look at me. I'm the alpha in the room. And it has negative effects. Exactly. And it's difficult because it shows other people that it's probably not good to speak up. The flip side of that is a really positive one. So, if you're in a room like that, lots of people, and a leader knows that someone else knows the answer to something or maybe has put time into learning about it, and they throw the spotlight over to them. Hey, I know that you've looked into this. What do you think about it? And that's kind of like raising someone up. So, you know, these things are really important and they go a long way. And I think, you know, I've said a lot of times that if you want to know what a company's culture is, just watch a few of their meetings. Meetings are where culture shows up and questions show up in meetings. So how they're done really, really matters.

That idea of watching a senior leader effectively throwing somebody under a bus in the example you just gave there in front of the rest of the organization is not going to engender any kind of curiosity from anybody else. They're going to just keep doing the same thing they've always done.

I've watched people listen to an offhand comment from a leader in a meeting and then go scramble around to try to figure out what they meant. Try to get inside the head of the boss instead of learning about it or injecting their own thinking. So yeah, I think it just sets this example that permeates through an organization.

So you've worked at Columbia University, you've worked at MTV, you've worked at PwC, you've worked with wrestlers, WWE wrestlers. We must discuss that in a minute. Is it made up? No, don't tell us. We don't want to burst the bubble for anybody. Where have you seen that curiosity has worked really well and the outcome has been amazing? And where have you maybe seen to temper that, where people have been curious maybe in the wrong direction and it hasn't quite worked out? Or maybe with curiosity, there is no wrong direction. It's just a winding path on the way to an eventual answer.

Yeah. Yeah. So the places where I think it's worked the best are when the people who are trying to build the thing, build the product, build the service, the closer they can be to the actual users of that thing, the people who will experience it, the better. So that puts them in a position to actually learn from them. What are people's challenges? What is their experience looking like now? So anywhere, and you mentioned the world of wrestling. So I did spend a couple of years working at WWE.. And one of the things I really appreciated about that experience is I would go to events, I would talk to people at these events. It was, it was not allowed to just sort of, um, make up what somebody wanted. We had to go and truly understand it. And that was a really telling example for me because, uh, it showed that the closeness to the customer is, is what matters most. Um, in organizations where there's a lot of space, between the team and the customer, it's really hard. That space might be reports, sentiment analysis, people saying things in a conference room, and opinions start to form about what customers do want, but it's not really based on learning or any sort of exploration.

This episode is brought to you by Inspiring Change. We work with senior teams to help them be clear and intentional about the culture they need to be successful, to communicate change in a more human way, and to give their leaders the skills, tools, and confidence to be amazing catalysts for change. To learn more about our work and who we do it for, just pop along to inspiringchange.ie. And what about where it hasn't gone right? Any examples of that where people have been curious and tried things and it's all gone horribly wrong? Or as I said, is it all just learning?

I think it's all learning. You know, I think What I say a lot is you might be wrong. So you, you might ask some questions, you might learn about an experience, but after that, it's really risky to say, all right, we've got what we've got. Let's sit down, put our heads down for the next 3 months. Let's put together a plan, a roadmap, a deck, and that's going to be what we do. If you can shorten the cycles between defining what you think an experience should be and learning about it, you just learn faster. The, the analogy I use a lot of the time is imagine you were standing on one side of a, a soccer field or football field and you wanted to kick the ball from one end to the other and get it in the goal. You could just wind up and kick it as hard as you can and hope that maybe it ends up in the goal on the other side, or you can kind of dribble it across the field, get really close, and then kick it in the goal and your chances are pretty good. So I think shortening the cycles between learning and putting a stake in the ground, learning from that, putting a stake in the ground. I think that's the difference. That's the differentiator.

That idea of learning and failing fast.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And being okay with it. You know, I think there's, you know, a tendency to spend a lot of time on a decision, but it's not really the decision that matters most. It's what you do after the decision and just paying attention to what what resulted from it and being okay. All right, we were right on this, we were a little off the mark on this, and let's iterate and try again.

Pick up on that, what you just said there about be okay with it. What can organizations do, commercial organizations do to, quote, be okay with it, to give people the time and the space to be curious, to try? Because it strikes me that people are busier than ever. There is more work being heaped on them. There is more change happening. AI's in the mix, how we work, still hasn't quite settled down. So there's still a bit of a maelstrom around remote working and hybrid and all that stuff going on. So how do we get organizations to believe it's okay to give people the time in order to be curious, to try things, to maybe fail, to maybe get nowhere? But having gone up a cul-de-sac and they go, oh, actually there's nothing up here, we'll come back and we'll try something else. We don't want that to be— I think before that would have been kind of confined to like an innovation department. But we don't want it to be confined to a department, right? We want it to be everybody thinking like this. What do we need to tell organizations to create that space?

Yeah, yeah, you're right. I mean, it has to be a mindset. It can't be something that is done in, you know, one team or something like that. There's this perception that learning and sort of working in an iterative fashion takes longer. Hey, let's just decide, let's build the thing. What I've often done when I'm working with organizations who are a little apprehensive about working that way is I cite examples. There's one that I've cited a lot. I can't name the brand, but I was working on an application, a mobile application, and a bunch of people in a room deciding what features that thing would have. We spent 9 months building it. All of that time was spent in daily meetings, kind of going through everything. Launched the app, and we found that people used about 10% of it. So we looked at the stats. People didn't care about 90% of the features, but they really loved this one. We spent time trying to sort of, you know, spin the numbers and make assumptions about why that was, but we had wasted 9 months and that's a lot of time, a lot of money, multiple people in meetings. I mean, you know, you think about all the salary costs. So I think showing people examples like that where you can prove that working in a more iterative fashion saves you time and money, that starts to move the needle with people because otherwise they make this assumption that it takes longer. And I think, you know, if organizations make it a priority to experiment and not just say it, you know, if a leader just says, hey, we're an experimental organization and oh, by the way, this is the idea I want you to build. No, it doesn't really work. That behavior has to be modeled. People have to be rated on it. Their performance reviews have to include it. So, I think those are the things that move the needle, get teams excited about working that way, and shift that mindset.

If we believe then, because your point there for me screams culture, if we believe that organizational culture is aligned values and behaviors and processes and systems and ways of doing things that we all hold each other to account for, then by that definition, back to your point about performance management and back to your point about sprints and lean and failing fast and all of that, that the idea of curiosity really needs to be intentionally embedded into culture in an organization. Is that fair?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think culture, I've worked with organizations that have amazing experimental cultures and it's because that culture was formed across the organization. It wasn't a situation where a branding agency came in and said, this is what your culture is. And then, culture and values were told to the organization. You know, that stuff doesn't really work. If an organization forms its culture as a whole, that's where it starts to work. And what I've seen is companies where the internal teams like their jobs and believe in it and can be experimental, that translates to how they interact with customers. So customers will believe about an organization what an organization believes about itself. And that's, I think that's really, really important. So having sort of, you know, investing some time in learning what are things like for the organization now, for people in it, and then having conversations and working towards, well, this is what we want it to be and how might we get there?

Yeah. Yes, of course, having that line in the sand, first of all, how curious an organization are we today? How experimental an organization are we today is really, really important because if you're going to actually proactively and intentionally go after changing or moving your culture towards something that is more experimental, that is more creative or curious, then we've got to know where we come from to know where we're going to. I think it was Lewis Carroll that said in Alice Through the Looking Glass, when Alice was talking to the Cheshire Cat, she stopped and said, I don't know which path to take. And he said, well, where are you going? And she said, I don't know. And he said, well, just go any path then, because any path will take you there.

There you are. Yeah.

So, being more intentional about culture for me is really critically important. Back to that point about that experimental culture. When can or when does or just does good curiosity ever turn bad? And I asked that question because just as you were talking, I was thinking, God, you could spend an awful lot of time navel-gazing, trying things, experimenting. And not getting anywhere, not actually producing something or not getting to a service that your clients need. So when does good curiosity turn bad?

Yeah, yeah. It can turn bad if teams just sort of spin in this cycle of asking and asking and asking and not synthesizing what you're learning into at least a point of view. So once that point of view is formed, then you can create something that might solve the problem. But if you don't do that, if you just sort of stay in research mode, you're researching for the sake of researching. You have to do something with that information. And you have to know that that thing might be a little bit off the mark, but the more you do it, the closer you're going to get to that mark. So whenever I watch teams that sort of spin in research mode, they don't get a lot done. They end up sort of stuck and frustrated too. You know, they end up as frustrated teams because People might be shouting, we've done all this research, but nobody's really thought about what does it mean and what can we do about it. So I think that's a pitfall that can happen. Yeah.

So having a plan in place to make sure that we can be curious, but let's only be curious up until the 28th of February. And then after that, let's actually look at what we've got and come up with something. Is that what we need to do? Do we need to look at curiosity within a kind of a plan?

Yeah, yeah. I think dates, deadlines are really good. They're really helpful because they force a decision based on what you know at the time. I had a boss, this another story that makes me think of your question. So I had a boss who he would often change his mind about the direction we should be going and the things we should be focusing on. And we'd be in a meeting and we'd be talking about a project we'd be working on, and then he would tell us, shift your focus over here. And we'd walk out of that meeting so frustrated. This guy, oh, he can't make up his mind. It's so frustrating. Every day we're working on something different. And then the next meeting, I think he sensed this from us and he said, I reserve the right to change my mind when I have new information. And that just kind of changed it for me. He knew more that day than he did the prior day. And he wasn't just sort of sticking to what we were already doing and just kind of plowing through it because that's the decision we had made previously. He was staying nimble and staying agile. And when he said that, I couldn't argue with it. I mean, I think that's important in life. People change and learn new things.

There's one learning there for me in that story, which comes back to leadership communications and the lack of of why. When that leader said to you, I now want you to shift your gaze over here, forget about working on that project we've been working on for 6 weeks. Why? Why? Why? Because I've now got new information, because the market has moved, because the competitor has done it already, because, because, because. So at least give you guys the context of why that decision has been made. That's really important.

If people know why they're doing something, even if they don't agree with it, they understand it. And people can respect that. So I think that makes a huge difference. If people can't connect what they're doing to why they are doing it, then you just get apathy and people doing the same old, same old. Yeah.

Yeah. I want to rewind back to childhood in a second, but before I do, just thinking about my point at the beginning of the episode about practicality. If people leaders are listening to this, people are running teams, what are some of the really practical things that they can do to get their teams thinking a bit more curiously, or what can they do to try and create that environment in which it's okay just to spend a bit of time trying something new, even if it might fail? What can practically those people just be doing?

Yeah, I mean, a big one is listening, just simple listening, listening to your people and listening and then responding based on what was just said. There's, you know, people can sort of wait for the other person to finish and then say what they want to say. You know, that's not really listening. I think You know, modeling the behavior is huge. We've talked about that a little bit, but, you know, modeling curiosity, modeling experimentation, asking questions you don't know the answers to. I think that tells a lot about a leader. I think calling out the experiments as, you know, wins, even if it didn't lead to a big breakthrough or something like that, calling out those things and recognizing people who've done them. 'Cause if you only talk about the, you know, the wins and the, you know, the big, you know, money-making products and things like that, people will not be willing to really take a chance because they'll think, well, I'm only gonna be recognized if this thing goes perfect, so I'm not really gonna take chances on this. But if you reward people for taking some chances, those chances are gonna lead to really big breakthroughs because you're, you're going to go from not knowing to knowing, and that's going to get you closer. So I think listening, I think rewarding experimentation, those are big, and leaders have to model it.

Yeah. And I think that's a really interesting point about celebrating failure, because when we celebrate a failure, what we're celebrating is somebody trying something and it hasn't worked. And that's an avenue or a door that we can now close off. So that's one way that we know is not going to work. So that puts us a step closer to knowing the avenue or the door that is going to work. And that's powerful. I remember a friend of mine who works up in Northern Ireland, who used to work with an AIB, says that FAIL stands for First Attempt in Learning.

I like that. I like that.

Yeah. So every time we fail at something, actually, we've probably learned something that's going to help us to either not fail or perhaps even fail quicker the next time to get us closer every single time to that right answer, right?

Yeah, it's kind of the process of elimination. I think that's just a really effective way to get to the right answer. If you think about it that way, experimentation is really important.

And powerful to get you towards what it is you need to get toward.

Yeah.

Let me go back to childhood. There was an article in the paper here, maybe, I don't know, 2 weeks ago, and it was talking about the fact that kids that were going into crèche at the age of 4 or 5 couldn't run, couldn't jump, couldn't catch a ball, weren't able to do pretend, weren't able to have kind of fantasy games, weren't able to do any of that stuff, that creativity and perhaps curiosity that we used to have. And a lot of that was put down to screen time. And I think we often see it now that, you know, whether it be on a plane whether it be in a buggy walking down the street, whether it be in a restaurant, kids sitting with their faces buried in a phone.

Yeah.

And I wonder when we fast forward that 20 years, when those 2-year-olds are in their early 20s and in a job, what impact is that going to have on their curiosity in 2 decades' time?

Yeah, it's so sad when I'm out to dinner somewhere and I see a couple out to dinner on a table nearby and the 2 kids are just on the iPads and, you know, doing that. And I empathize with the parents because I get it. As much as I get it, I also think it's a really big thing to be concerned about because when you're— and this applies to adults too, but when you're looking at a screen, the information is just fed to you. You know, there's, there's really no need to be curious about it because everything is fed to you. Answers are told. Uh, you know, if you think about social media, you know, feeds, everything is just fed to you constantly, constantly, constantly. There's no opportunity to ask. And I've talked a lot about the education models and things like that. And I think education has a lot to do with that. I think there's places where memorization or playing back of things is the way students are judged. I interviewed somebody for the book, senior leader at a law firm. And I was just sort of asking him about his relationship with questions over time and and he called out a teacher he had in high school. And this, you know, this teacher still, you know, stands out to him this day. This teacher would kind of flip the traditional model on its head. And he would say, I want you to read about the Boston Tea Party. And then your assignment is to ask 3 questions about it and then explore those questions. Think about, you know, how might this have affected future generations? You know, how might this have, you know, been prevented. Just the assignment was open-ended. And this person that I, you know, that I was interviewing, he said, every time I'm faced with a problem at work, I think about that teacher. And I think about, you know, instead of my question being, well, how can we use XYZ software to solve this? His question is, you know, what do I not know about this? And how can I find out? And, you know, it influences him to this day. And I just think You know, more, more teaching kind of followed a bit of that. I think it'd be good, especially today with, with AI. You know, it's every answer is fed to you instantly, you know, and, you know, students can easily have AI do their homework, you know, all of these things. And I think you start to lose your curiosity. So I think the way people use AI should change, at least in school. You know, I think teachers should say you're required to use AI for this and your assignment is to tell me about how you did, what worked, what didn't work versus, you know, if we find out you wrote your paper with AI, you're going to be expelled. You know, I just think that's not reality because, you know, when you go into the world of work, you are required to use AI. You know, it's, that's the way it is. So yeah, clearly I have some opinions on that.

Yeah, I'm sure we might get, we may get some comments later on that from possibly from university teachers and professors. But I definitely agree. And I think there's probably a place now that there's never been a more important time for curiosity with the advent of AI than now, because we have to keep going. Is that true? Is that true? Is that the right way to do it? Is that the only way to do it? Is there a better way to do it? Is there a different way to do it? We should be doing that all the time. And even if that curiosity is simply resulting in a different or a better prompt for the AI, then that's a good thing because actually we've spent the bit of time thinking, well, I wonder, is that actually the right answer? I wonder, does that really work? I wonder, did it just make it up? Is it just, is that just something that's just made up? I don't know. But if we don't ask those questions, we're probably not getting a brilliant answer.

Yeah, yeah. You have to challenge it, you know, hold it accountable. You know, it's not a human, but it's still something you need to hold accountable and put to work for you versus it kind of dictating what you do.

Yeah, yeah. Brilliant. Joe, we've come to the end of our time, and I've really, really enjoyed the conversation. If you want to hear more about Joe's work or get in touch with Joe, pop along to joelally.com. And I presume that, Joe, your book, Question to Learn: How Curiosity Can Transform Your Career, Team, and Organization, is available on Amazon and at all good bookstores.

It is. Yes, it is.

Brilliant. Brilliant. Listen, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. Thanks a million for being here.

Thanks so much. I really enjoyed it.

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