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Critical Skills - Curiosity (reprise)

Steven Forth

Steven Forth is co-founder and managing partner at Ibbaka. See his skill profile here.

(An earlier post on curiosity as a critical skill was accidentally deleted. This is a reprise that goes in a slightly different direction, but that uses the same snippet from the skill graph.)

Children are naturally curious. Always asking why. My granddaughter is very observant. She notices all the little changes in the garden, what new books are out on the table, which earings people are wearing. Being observant is an important part of curiosity.

Some of us lose our curiosity as we get older and set in our ways. But the last two years have reinforced that we live in an uncertain and shifting world, where change can come from unexpected directions. In such a world, change is a survival skill.

But is curiosity really a skill? Or is it better thought of as a behavior, a habit or an attitude.

Knowledge, Skills and Attitudes are often grouped together. We explored this in our post The A in KSA is for Abilities or Attitudes or Attributes?

We are not the only people asking this question. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently published a working draft of its guidance on Task Knowledge Skill (TKS) Statements - Authoring Guide for Workforce Frameworks (a workforce framework is pretty much the same thing as a competency model).

Could curiosity be one of the skill used to build knowledge?

Let’s look at the NIST definitions here.

Knowledge: A retrievable set of concepts within memory.

Curiosity may help to build knowledge, but it is not itself a form of knowledge.

Skill: The capacity to perform an observable action.

This does not sound right either. There are skills that can help us to satisfy our curiosity. But curiosity itself is not a skill. It does seem to be an attitude though.

Attitudes: “a settled way of thinking or feeling about someone or something, typically one that is reflected in a person's behavior.” (from Oxford)

If curiosity is an attitude, then how does it fit into the skill graph?

Like all KSAs, ‘curiosity’ requires certain skills in order to demonstrate it, and others that mediate it.

Often, curiosity is triggered by observing something new in the environment, something one does not understand. Observation is a foundation skill that encourage curiosity. One can go beyond observing, and actively scan the environment. This is what my granddaughter does whenever she visits. She quickly looks around to see what is happening. She is, as they say, situationally aware. The scanning leads to exploration and then to asking questions, so many questions, and many of them need more exploration to find answers.

Some people are surprised to see social networking as a supporting skill for curiosity.

Social networking has a bad rap these days. It is often associated with echo chambers and people who will only listen to people that share their own views. This is the opposite of curiosity. But it is also the opposite of good social networking, where one reaches out to people with different knowledge, experience and opinions and enters conversations with them. We cannot satisfy our curiosity by ourself.

Curiosity by itself can only take us so far.

It is difficult to make sense of isolated facts. To give a fact meaning, amd make it an insight, it needs to be connected to other things. Making connections is a critical skill that we will cover in a future post. Curiosity about one new thing tends to lead to another. We see this in children, with their series of why questions. This has even been formalized into the Five Whys approach originally developed by Sakichi Toyoda, whose company would go on to become Toyota Motors.

Insights from curiosity will only impact business if they are shared and if they contribute to ones own and to others learning.

Curiosity is critical to many business functions, from sales and design thinking to corporate development (mergers and acquisitions) and innovation.

Curiosity is even surfacing as a leadership skill. Francesca Gino has a wonderful article in the September-October 2018 of Harvard Business Review on The Business Case for Curiosity. Curious? I encourage you to spend some time and read it, share it with your social network (you can share this post to), and put your curiosity to work.

Ibbaka posts on critical skills