"I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious." ~ Albert Einstein

June 29, 2021 Gregory Ronczewski

By Gregory Ronczewski, Director of Product Design at Ibbaka. See his skill profile.

Last week we unveiled the Design Thinking Open Competency Model, available to everyone through the Ibbaka Talent platform. Offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) license that lets others remix, adapt, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under identical terms. The model has six jobs, eight roles and behaviours and fifty-five skills. As expected, you will find Empathy or Critical Thinking listed in the skills drawer. There are also some less common skills, like Abductive Reasoning or Tradeoff Management, secured their position in our Open Competency Model. However, as I looked at the list, there was one skill that I could not find - Curiosity. It is one of the Critical Skills, and this is not just my opinion.

"Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvellous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity." ~ Albert Einstein

According to two psychologists, Jordan Litman and Paul Silvia, there are two types of Curiosity. They published a paper on this in 2006 listing what they called "I-curiosity" and "D-curiosity." The first one stands for "interest" - the hunger for knowledge, and it is a curiosity that gives us pleasant feelings. Learning something offers its own satisfaction. It is not necessarily driven by a desire to find specific information or fill a gap in our knowledge base - we don't know that there is a gap. It is the pure pleasure of finding something new. Usually, it is just a tiny little nugget of information that opens the door to a place we have never visited. It is a great feeling, and I am sure that we will need a lot of Curiosity in the Design Thinking process to uncover different aspects of the problem we want to solve. Think about children. They are natural Design Thinkers. They constantly ask Why? Why? Why? driving parents crazy. They use the "I-curiosity."

The other Curiosity is not that pleasant - the "D" stands for "depravation" - the information gap that puts us in the restless, "oh I need to know it right away" state. In his very intriguing book Unwinding Anxiety, Judson Brewer gives this example of the second type of curiosity: think about a moment when in a conversation someone mentions a movie and a famous actress... what was her name? You know her. You feel her name is at the tip of your tongue. You think that it starts with the letter "s" and yet, you don't remember. It's like trying to squeeze the information out of your brain. You will not be able to concentrate on doing anything else until you get her name. Even hours later, this restless feeling will not go away.

The "D-curiosity" is all about the destination. "I-curiosity" is about the journey, and the Design Thinking process is very much a journey to observe but also experience the roots of the problem in question.

Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test - this is how Stanford d.school defines the Design Thinking process. Of course, there are some variations to this 5-step process. Sometimes, the Implementation phase is added at the end, and the steps are grouped into three elegant phases: understand, explore and materialize. There is a ton of literature virtually dissecting each step of the process, so I will not try to bring it up here again. What I would like to do, though, is to explore it, or let's say, be curious about what is happening inside our heads as we apply the Design Thinking process.

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman is one of the best books I have ever read. In my opinion, it should be a mandatory read at all design schools. It changes the way we think about our thinking. We need to remember that whatever we do, our self-healing and self-regulating bodies will always try to lower the amount of energy required for any given task. Thinking is not only time-consuming but also energy-depriving. Hence the Fast and Slow thinking process. Most of the time, we fly on an auto-pilot. Suppose you combine what Kahneman wrote with Judson Brewer's analysis of habit loops that we use all the time (to save energy). In that case, you end up with a landscape on which your Design Thinking journey unfolds in a way that, regardless of engagement, the brain will try as much as possible to lower the effort. Curiosity, the one with the "I" is one of the few moments when the learning experience is not forced, but natural. And again, think about our lizard brain, the old and deep structure we use all the time despite being literally covered in technology. We are still hunter-gatherers regardless of what we think about ourselves. Understanding how the brain works allow us to truly observe, empathize, iterate and finally deploy a new product, an innovation or simply see what's going on.

You can find the Design Thinking Open Competency Model on Ibbaka Talent. Perhaps, consider creating an account on the platform. At the time of writing this, Curiosity was not present in the model. But, since this is an Open Model, I will experiment with adding this skill to boost the Skill coverage.

PS In 2018, I wrote a post on Ibbaka Talent Blog using Albert Einstein's quote as a title. For some reason, this post is getting a lot of traffic. So, I will do it again here, and I am Curious if this post will bring the traffic up.

Ibbaka Posts on Critical Skills