In this episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, David is joined by Stefaan van Hooydonk, Founder of the Global Curiosity Institute and author of the best-selling book The Workplace Curiosity Manifesto. 

Stefaan has conducted a breadth of research surrounding the topic of curiosity at work. He believes that curious individuals need curious environments to thrive and that in times of economic turmoil, individuals and companies need to start embracing the power of intentional curiosity.

The conversation will cover the following:

• The background and various definitions of the concept of curiosity over time

• The importance of curiosity in individual and business success

• The difference in curiosity levels between small and larger organisations

• The drivers and barriers of curiosity at work

• How organisations can measure curiosity at work

• How to promote a culture of curiosity and foster a mindset of curiosity at an individual level

Enjoy!

Support from this podcast comes from TechWolf. You can learn more by visiting: techwolf.ai

David Green: Today, I'm talking with Stefaan van Hooydonk, who after being Chief Learning Officer at companies including Nokia, Cognizant, Philips and Agfa, was inspired to found the Global Curiosity Institute and write the bestselling book, The Workplace Curiosity Manifesto.  Dedicated to cultivating curiosity in individuals and organisations around the world, in this episode, Stefaan and I discuss the importance of curiosity at work and why it's so critical to successful innovation and growth and continuous learning.

Stefaan van Hooydonk: There's two types of learning in organisations.  You either have push or pull learning.  Push learning is kind of compliance-based, somebody deciding for me what I should learn, and that often is not very empowering.  And then you have pull-based learning, it's really curiosity-driven learning, and that's so important for organisations to allow people to learn not only for the current role, but also for the next role, not knowing what that next role could be, and how much are we training these B-players to become A-players.

David Green: Stefaan has conducted some profound research into the topic of curiosity in the workplace and he has some great insights and advice on how organisations can successfully measure and cultivate this key element of workplace culture.  So without further ado, let's explore the power of curiosity and what it means for the future of work.

Stefaan, welcome to the show, it's great to have you on.  Before we dive into the discussion, could you share with the listeners a little bit about yourself and the inspiration behind starting the Global Curiosity Institute, because I know you spent quite a long time as a chief learning officer in a number of different global companies, didn't you?

Stefaan van Hooydonk: Absolutely, and actually the learning and the HR and the analytics world, or the HR analytics world, is quite familiar to me.  I've spent the biggest part of my career in learning, setting up corporate universities for big companies like Nokia, like Agfa, like Philips and I have travelled the world, I have spent time in China, in Finland, in Saudi, in the UK and a couple of other countries.  And then, about two years ago, I left the corporate world and I set up the Global Curiosity Institute because I had been already reflecting.

It's a beautiful role to be in learning and development, because you can coach people, you can mentor people, you can grow people, and at some point I realised that some people I don't need to train and grow, because they do everything themselves.  And I started to reflect, why is that; why is it some people are asking stupid questions all the time; why do some people read more or look more at TED talks, etc; and why do they share more?  When new colleagues come on board, why do they spend more time with these new colleagues, while other people just say hi, shake a hand and just get on with things?

I bumped into the notion of curiosity later on, and I started calling these people A-players.  And I realised very early on, or I asked myself the questions, actually these A-players are often a minority in organisations, so what can I do to train -- or, what do I need to do to all of the other, say, 80% of the population to make sure they also become A-players?  I did some really beautiful pilots with 15,000 people and the results were actually enormous. 

That's why I left my cosy, corporate role and I set up the institute, because very little research was done on the space of curiosity and what is it and can we train it; how do we train it; how can we measure it, because curiosity's one of those words that we use very loosely, but often, like so many other words, we're not really reflecting deeply on those words.  So, that's what I'm trying to do and I'm trying to help companies and leaders to regain their almost childhood drive for curiosity.

David Green: There's a really well-known saying, "Curiosity killed the cat".  This implies that curiosity is a negative thing, when in fact, as you've beautifully articulated, curiosity in a workplace should be seen as a positive and actually helps people perform better.  You've done a lot of research on this topic; could you share what curiosity actually is?

Stefaan van Hooydonk: It's a beautiful question and let me first talk about what it is, and then share a little bit where the "curiosity killed the cat" and the negative connotations come, because it's still pervasive in language and the way we approach curiosity in many parts of society, although not everywhere.

For me, curiosity is, or the definition I'm using, is the mindset to challenge the status quo, to explore, discover and learn.  Now immediately, it has three dimensions, so let me put them on the table.  There's curiosity about the world, curiosity about others and curiosity about myself.  Now, curiosity about the world is what you typically think about curiosity in pretty much all cultures; it's being interested in stuff, a child being interested in a phone or an iPad or anything, any stuff, or Einstein discovering the Universe.  So, that's typically what we think of curiosity. 

Now, I've added two dimensions, which are probably very important, especially in the workplace.  One is curiosity about others, like how much interest do I have in David sitting in front of me, and going deep?  Of course, we only see each other for 40 minutes or so, but what about the people that I work with, what about the people that I live with; do I take them for granted, or do I get to know them once and then think that I know them all along?  Knowing for instance that most couples, they split not because they fight, but because they get bored with each other, they stop exploring.

Then the third dimension is curiosity of myself; what are my superpowers; what are my drivers; what are my beliefs; what are stories I tell myself about who I should be or what is right or wrong?  So, curiosity with the world, others and self, you hear me talk about that quite often.

Now, "curiosity killed the cat", in many languages we have these negative connotations.  In the Polish language, there is a saying like, "Curiosity is the first step to Hell", or I was talking to a Romanian professional a couple of days ago and she said, "In the Romanian language, there's a saying something like, 'Curious people die early'".  When you reflect upon those phrases, they all pre-date the 1950s.  Up until that roughly 1950s, curiosity was seen as something very negative.  It's like children poking their noses into areas where they're not supposed to. 

Then, after the 1950s, curiosity is really into a positive movement, that we want our kids to be curious and challenge the teacher that they're having; while beforehand, it was listen to the teacher and behave, because otherwise you're a bad child.  Also, leaders and company owners and professionals more and more are embracing curiosity to a point where some people say, "I'm curious all the time", which is great, because curiosity leads to development, leads to learning, leads to accepting changes, leads to a more meaningful life, leads to more happiness, more resilience and many other dimensions. 

But sadly, in some parts of society and in some companies, we still have a negative connotation of curiosity, that curious people are difficult to manage, that some leaders are -- well, when I'm asking leaders, "How much do you think that curiosity is a good thing for an organisation?" 90% say, "Yes, it leads to innovation, it leads to engagement, there's a clear HR angle, there's also a clear innovation angle".  When I'm asking then a follow-up question, "How much are you inviting curiosity to your team?" then only 50% say, "I am", as if it's a bit of a theory and practice, "In theory, I think curiosity's a good thing for the organisation, but in practice I'd rather have some other team deal with it, because my team is dealing with efficiency and I cannot deal with challenging the status quo, doing things differently", because of stress, because of many other reasons that maybe we can unpack a little bit later.  So, it has this positive/negative connotation, still very much true.

David Green: It's interesting, isn't it, because if I think, obviously I've got two relatively young kids, they're 14 and 12 now, they're still extremely curious now.  But when I think back to when they were younger, particularly before they went to school, they were extremely curious.  They were asking questions about everything, they want to understand how everything works; it's how we learn, which will lead us to our next question about learning, a link with learning and development.

One wonders, even though curiosity is seen as a more positive thing than it was before the 1950s, you still wonder institutionally, whether it's a school or workplace, even if they say they're open to curiosity, just to your point there, that kind of paradox between the 90% and the 50%, do they openly create a culture of curiosity, and that's probably something we can unpack, I guess, as we go.

Stefaan van Hooydonk: Let's look at the opposite of curiosity, and for me the opposite of curiosity is conformity.  In a sense, there's nothing wrong with conformity, because conformity helps us to make sense of the world, or make the world a simpler place that we don't have to every day find a new route to our office, or that we have to learn a language every day, because we want to be conformist; and there's two types of conformity: the conformity that we do to ourselves; and the conformity that others do to us.

The conformity that we do to ourselves is indeed, we want the world to be predictable, that whatever I learned yesterday is still relevant today, that my toothpaste hasn't turned into poison.  You want to trust many things because otherwise it's just too cognitively challenging.  And that's why we take the same route to our office every day; that's why we are often not welcoming new ideas, if they don't fit our own ideas.  That's why we often have lunch with the same type of people every day in the office; or, that's why we often go to the same restaurant and even order the same type of dish every time we go to a restaurant.

Then we have the conformity that others do to us and we happily comply, because we want to be seen as a loyal and loving member of the tribe.  So suddenly, if you're sitting in a management team meeting and saying suddenly, "Hey, guys and girls, we're off to completely the wrong start [or] we're going in the wrong direction", it's often not very much seen in a positive light, because that puts you onto the side and on the margins of your tribe, which is often challenging.  But there's nothing wrong with that, because curiosity is almost the base position to which we're always drawn.

Often, we're curious in the beginning of things, when we start a new relationship, when we start a new job, when we start a new company, when we're doing a podcast like this for the first time; we're all excited.  Then after a while, we get used to it and we think we know, and conformity almost has this gravitational pull, that we always, after a while, need to succumb to.  That's why I'm often talking about, it's not about curiosity per se, it's about intentional curiosity. 

Given that this conformity is a given that we're pulled towards, how much are we going to, as an individual or as a leader or as a team or as a company, going to take action to overcome that gravitational pull; and how much will we pull against in the other direction, allowing curiosity from happening in our workplaces and checking on ourselves, checking on others and checking on the world, how and why things can be different and just questioning, "As I still on the right track?" type of thing.

David Green: As you explained at the start, you worked as a chief learning officer in a number of big, global countries, in different countries as well, so obviously see different cultures and their approach to curiosity and learning.  Why is curiosity so important for individual career development and for business as well?

Stefaan van Hooydonk: If we're living in stable environments, we don't really need curiosity.  That's why curiosity wasn't really regarded as being important in the 20th century because let's face it, the 20th century wasn't really as dynamic as the times that we're having now.  But once the environment is changing, you can bet that all the questions that you used to ask and all the answers that you had to those questions are probably up for renewal.  Also, when you're looking at the shelf life of knowledge in the 20th century, you can go to school once and then you were ready for the rest of your life.

But nowadays, we have to learn constantly and there's two types of learning in organisations.  You either have push or pull learning.  Push learning is kind of compliance-based, somebody deciding for me what I should learn, and that often is not very empowering, even if a manager tells me you have to learn about management skills, or behaviour skills, when it doesn't come out of myself, often I'm not as keen of doing this.  And then you have pull-based learning, it's really curiosity-driven learning, and that's so important for organisations to allow people to learn not only for the current role, but also for the next role, not knowing what that next role could be. 

How much are we training these B-players to become A-players, because these B-players, it's as if they've lost something out of their rucksack, as you said earlier, maybe during their youth or during at school or maybe as professionals, their curiosity, or their curiosity muscle, isn't that strong anymore.  And some companies are doing really brilliant jobs at actually training people on how to rekindle my curiosity muscle, because some people have kind of lost it or forgotten it, of their muscle hasn't strengthened over the last period; and also then work on processes and cultures and practices in an organisation to enable curiosity.  So, if you're not curious nowadays, you're not going to be ready for a very long future, I think, and you'll also see that in research, people are changing careers much more often.

Maybe the last point is that there's an interesting -- if you're looking at curiosity over knowledge, it's an inverted U-shape.  So, if you don't have any knowledge, then you can't be curious about things.  So you need knowledge to build on to be curious, and curiosity needs knowledge to grow on.  That's for instance why it's so important not to be too quick at googling, because the more you delegate your brain and your knowledge base into the internet, the more stupid questions you are going to ask.  And the more you learn and build your knowledge through intensive learning and using the internet in a positive way, but also reading and talking to people and getting mentored and getting coached, etc, the richer the questions you're going to ask.

Now, the danger is that after a while, you think you know, and at that moment your curiosity goes down.  I often use the example in North America, there's research that showed something very counterintuitive, ie that older doctors are less good at diagnosing patients than younger doctors.  That's very counterintuitive, because we always want to talk to the more experienced, the grey doctor with the white robe; and we say to the youngsters, "Well, learn a couple more years and then we'll talk to you and we'll have you do the surgery on me".

Well, research has shown that actually, those young doctors just save more lives.  And a big part of that for the older doctors is they're playing on automatic pilot.  They think they know, while those younger doctors might tell themselves, "I know for 80%, 90%, but this 10%, I might not fully know", and therefore they're going to check in with peers or check the research and save more lives in the process.  And I often ask the question, "As an HR or as a learning professional, how much do you consider yourself an expert in the same vein, an expert who doesn't need to be trained?" 

If you're looking at many competency models in many companies, the first level of a competency model is called "learner", which is completely wrong, I think, because it means as if the people that are beyond that stage don't need to be learning anymore.  And I think the CEO or the heads of learning, the heads of HR should be as much having learning on their agenda as everybody else in the organisation.

David Green: I agree.  It's interesting, if I think back over my career, I probably strive more to learn now and am more curious now than I was when I was younger, and I do much better now from a career perspective in the last five to ten years than I had done previously, and I swear that's because I'm always striving to learn more.  So, if we look again, going through the research that you've done, Stefaan, what would you say are the main drivers of curiosity at work?

Stefaan van Hooydonk: Great question.  Curious individuals need curious organisations to thrive.

David Green: And vice versa probably.

Stefaan van Hooydonk: And vice versa, absolutely, and often we want to work for curious organisations.  Interesting also, there's a 90% growth of the use of the word "curiosity" in online job ads, so many organisations are becoming aware that curiosity is a good thing.  When I was interviewing people at Merck, the recruitment responsible people there, they told me that in their analysis, the use of the word "curiosity" appeals to all demographics, so not only the youngsters, but also the older people.  Where if you're looking at words like "sustainability", it's more appealing to the youngsters than appealing to the older demographic. 

So somehow, the use of curiosity is beautiful, because often we assign curiosity to the individual, as if the environment has little to say about it.  But if you're looking, for instance, more and more companies are using curiosity as a corporate value, or changing towards curiosity or exploration or something like it to say, "Actually, at the highest level of our values, that is something we stand for".  McKinsey, the consulting company, they have one value and it's the obligation to dissent.  So, it's not only okay to have a different perspective, it's even an obligation.  If you want to make a career in that company, you have to challenge the status quo, you have to come up with new information; regardless of seniority, you have to challenge your CEO and your seniors, of course with data and caring and politeness.

Then you have practices.  How much are we recruiting for curiosity?  Let's do a quick thought experiment.  Let's say we're both sitting in a promotion committee and there are two dossiers on the table.  We have Mary and Jeff and we can only choose one; we don't have budget or opportunities for more.  Jeff is a person who has been overachieving over the last couple of years.  Every project that we have asked him to do, he's done it and then some.  And for a couple of years, and last time, he didn't get promoted, so he's on the table and he has all the right suitability.

Then we have Mary who's also overachieving on many of her objectives, and then last year she did something that we all supported; she actually volunteered to join a companywide project on something extremely strategic that even the board was aware of.  Now, that project failed miserably.  She learned a lot and the company learned a lot, but everybody that was part of that project somehow got tainted.  But we realised she's a great performer and that she stuck out her neck, so she's also on the table.

Who would we select to be promoted?  Depending on the culture of your organisation and depending on whether your companies are working for start-ups or scale-ups or grown-ups, there's a different answer.  In the grown-up companies, what often I hear is that actually we will promote Jeff, if we're really honest.  We should promote Mary, but maybe Jeff is the conformist choice.  And then the moment you move to scale-ups and start-ups, then there's much more a willingness to promote Mary.  And it doesn't mean that Mary's only about curiosity, it's Mary is also about performing.  So it's both the curiosity as well as the conformity. 

But then again, that's in the promotion side, and there's many other steps that we can take to create curious workspaces.

David Green: Great example.  I was smiling, because I work in a company of 20 people, so I'd probably promote Mary!  But yeah, it might have been different when I was at IBM, who knows.  And what would you say are some of the main barriers?  I mean, obviously a lot of it's the opposite of what you said probably, but what would you say are the main barriers preventing curiosity in a workplace?  I'm guessing a lot of it is down to leaders, leadership and culture.

Stefaan van Hooydonk: Leaders has a huge example, but there's probably intrinsic barriers as well as extrinsic ones.  Intrinsic barriers are the things I do to myself, and that could be the stories that I have, the interest that I have in it, the knowledge that I have.  If I have little knowledge of something, I can't be very curious about it.  If there's a change happening in my organisation and I know little of that change, I'm often not going to be very interested in that change and might even resent it.  So, there are a number of things.

Stress is also a big one, the more stress I have.  A little bit of stress if good to get people out of their comfort zone, but too much stress is paralysing.  So, if people are bogged down with too many things on their plate, if they don't create the time and the space, because curiosity needs time and space; but also the environment is really important.  We've talked already about the culture and the processes, but also the leader is hugely important.

Back to learning, and maybe we could talk already a little bit about measurement, given that we're talking about analytics.  In my last corporate job at Cognizant, big company, 300,000 people, and my analytics group and myself, we started having some questions, or not some questions but at least came up with some hypotheses so we could do some more number crunching.  And one of these hypotheses was, "Is the learning behaviour of a manager indicative for the learning behaviour of the team; yes or no?"  If a manager is learning a lot, does the team learn a lot?

Intuitively that makes sense, but we've actually proven it with data, that actually the manager who has many learning hours, and learning hours I'm talking about anything we can get our hands on, the books that they read online that we could track and the learnings; if the manager is high on that, the team is also high on learning.  And it's not because a manager learns, but it's more what the manager talks about, he or she.  If the manager says, "I've seen this TED Talk, why don't I share it with the team?" or, "I've written this book [or] I've gone to this course", or uses curious language, "I'm interested in…" has curious language, the team recognises that this is desired behaviour and the team will follow.

The sad thing is the opposite is also true.  If the manager falls flat on learning hours, the team also falls flat on learning hours.  But for the A-players, they don't need the role model or the negative role model of a manager to stop them from learning, because they have this intrinsic drive to go learning.  But you mentioned leaders, so often leaders don't realise the shadow they're casting upon the team, they just don't know what important role they have.  And just telling them, or giving, sharing with kindness this data with leaders already is a great moment of introspection for those leaders.  Often, I see immediate changes with those leaders if they do something about it, so the power of data is crucial.

David Green: How else would you go about measuring curiosity in the workplace?

Stefaan van Hooydonk: Well, something I hope I made one contribution to the world is to say that actually, you can measure curiosity, because curiosity is often considered this vague thing that you have or you don't have, which is not entirely true, and that you can't measure; but you actually can measure curiosity, and actually you can measure it in two different ways, in a qualitative and a quantitative fashion.

Quantitatively, I've designed a couple of diagnostics, and one is for people at home, their personal curiosity levels, and I measure about curiosity of the world, curiosity with others and curiosity of yourself; people can take that free online and we have now already more than 5,000 people taking it, also a professional version of that.  I also have another diagnostic which is measuring how companies are showing up.  So, what is the extrinsic dimension?  How much is an organisation curious, or allowing curiosity in its processes, in its culture, in its management style, in its role models, looking more towards the past, looking more towards the future, etc?  So, that's the quantitative way of measuring.

But there's also a qualitative way of measuring, just checking in with colleagues.  Imagine you're an HR chief, you can ask, "How am I doing as your HR manager?" or you can also ask your colleagues in this meeting, or in this week, "Did I show up more with curiosity, or did I show up more with judgement?" which is a form of conformity.  And I think the most beautiful question that people can ask others and give themselves a gift is a type of reverse feedback.  If you're a senior, ask your juniors, "How am I doing?" 

It's amazing what I've found so far.  For instance, only 24% of the people say that they're regularly curious at work.  So, it means that everybody's curious at some point, but "regular" is an important statement here.  Start-ups are four times more ready to learn from mistakes when compared to grown-up companies; or middle managers are about four times less ready to say that curiosity is a good thing for an organisation when I compared then to first-line managers or senior executives.  And the curiosity goes down after three years in the same role, and that's a callout for job rotation and mobility in an organisation, because after three years, people become part of the furniture; not everybody, because sometimes people can maintain their creativity, can maintain some high levels of innovation.

But the consequence of this research should be that a standard callout should be three years in your role, you have to have a really good reason why you should stay in that role, otherwise we're going to rotate you out and bring you to new pastures, so that you can learn new things and you can ask new questions.

David Green: Let's stay with the organisations for a minute.  So, those organisations that have gone through analysis of their curiosity levels at the organisational level and would like to improve, or even maybe build a culture of curiosity, what are some of the key actions that they could take to promote this?

Stefaan van Hooydonk: Well, there are a number of steps.  First of all, the baselining is really important, "How are we doing?" and companies could either do some diagnostics like I've designed, or they can include in their engagement surveys questions around curiosity, around exploration.  What's very important is that companies are clear about the definition, whether it's only about curiosity of the world, or also about others, themselves; companies have to be clear about it before they have a question strategy.  So, that's a really important one.

Then, once they have that, it's probably important for companies to prioritise, "Where do we want to get most out of our buck?  Do we want to spend more time on recruitment or more on retention or more on offboarding?" or something like that, and then start to deep dive and maybe audit the organisation.  And "audit", I use it in a friendly environment.  Then I think an important part is training, training the group itself, HR, "How curious are we, and can we maybe use ourselves as a pilot group to baseline ourselves, but also train on different aspects of curiosity".  Then I'd start with leaders and then I'd start with the rest of the organisation.

The next possibility could be design curiosity in new processes that you're creating, whether it's L&D processes, new solutions, or maybe you might have a new diversity programme rolling out.  I've got some really good examples of companies that use curiosity as a driver for curiosities, interested in the other, and then would be embedding it into how are you going to embed it and how are you going to make sure that your CEO also talks about curiosity and how are you going to drive things and change in a more sustainable way?

David Green: So, I mean that was my follow-up question actually, one or two examples of companies that have done a really good job of embedding curiosity perhaps, either in a programme or actually into the culture, even better?

Stefaan van Hooydonk: Well, I think one good example, a very good example for me is Microsoft.  The moment that Satya Nadella came onboard in February 2014, he radically chose culture as a change.  And he focused on change with growth mindset and he changed the mentality in the organisation.  If you're looking at the stock exchange and if you're looking at the market capital of Microsoft, actually recently it's coming down a little bit, but let's look about this first from 2014 to post-COVID. 

He's done such an amazing job in changing the culture from a know-it-all culture to a learn-it-all culture, and curiosity was around all the time, "Let's be more curious about ourselves, about how we show up as leaders, how we show up towards customers, what our product roadmap should be", etc.  So, I think that's a great example on the culture side.  There's many other companies I can think.  You have Google, the 20% rule, 20% of your time you can spend on things; or Intuit, they're celebrating failures, failure parties, fuck-up Fridays, "It's Friday, great, who's done something wrong?" and celebrate that! 

In terms of learning, I think there are two beautiful examples who are radically using different approaches.  You have, for instance, on the one hand, Novartis doing a brilliant job at changing the environment, I would say, in terms of learning, because they're creating the extrinsic environment, they're making it easier for people to access.  They've democratised learning.  Any licences they have, anybody can take, while before it was only for leaders or only for finance people or only for IT people.  But now, no boundaries, anybody who's willing.  And they also set, for instance, a high bar for 100 hours of learning per person.  So, these are companies -- Novartis is a good example of a company that wants to go radically in improving and embedding curiosity in the environment. 

Then another company, Merck, the German-based company, Merck, they're going radically to the individual, because they said, "Okay, we realise that quite a number of individuals have lost their muscle of curiosity.  Let's train these people on curiosity, and teams, what it is to be curious, what strategies you can deploy".  So, they're not necessarily focusing on the environment, they're focusing radically on the individual, and they have beautiful examples and beautiful results.

Something that I also did at Cognizant, when I said 15,000 people was a pilot, we had this new culture, this new learning culture rolling out in the organisation, and it was Open.Wonder.Learn and we said, "Okay, we're going to be much more about pull than about push, and every 300,000 people, please join us".  It was quite interesting and I realised that later, the A-players, they jumped onboard immediately.  Then the B-players, they were sitting on the fence.  So, just telling people, "It's okay to be learning [or] let's learn or be self-exploring and be a self-starter" doesn't make people be, apart from the A-players.

Then we realised, "How can we get those B-players over off the fence and into the new reality?" and we did 45-minute short sessions around how to be more curious, and we told people about neuroplasticity; it is possible to change, and regardless what age.  We gave them strategies, and also invited them to share with at least one other person, or leaders with their team, what they thought of that 45-minute session.  Three months later, we saw already quite drastic changes when we checked in with people.  And one year later, we saw that the average learning hours for the company is 25 hours.  For this group of 15,000 people, 12 months after those sessions, their average was 43 hours. 

So, just telling people it's okay to be curious is a good start; but giving them tools and training to deal with how to be more of a self-starter, how to be more curious and help them reflect on this exponentially increased the value of learning.

David Green: Curiosity, is it a skill or a behaviour or a bit of both?

Stefaan van Hooydonk: It is both a state and a trait.  About 50%, you're born with, so some people are just naturally better because of executive power in their minds and their genetic makeup; 50% is what you acquire after you're born.  That's why it's so important, the environment is so important, and that's also a good thing that you can learn, you can improve that 50% that you were born with, that's around after you were born.  Because, if we're not intentional about it, we get pulled towards that conformity and also it becomes kind of a New Year's resolution, something that's exciting for two weeks, but then its novelty wanes and we start focusing on the conformity and the things of today.

David Green: How can HR help the business identify and prioritise the critical skills it needs for the future?

Stefaan van Hooydonk: If you're looking at curiosity of the self and expand it not only to me as an individual, but me as an HR group, or me as an organisation, then suddenly you are going to reflect on, "What are my deeper drivers; what are my assumptions; what's my role as HR in an organisation?  Am I here as a policeman to make sure all the processes are followed, or am I the cocreator of this new reality and this new competitive reality?"  So I think curiosity of self is an extremely important dimension for individuals.  Is curiosity important for us?  I see very few industries where curiosity, or this balance between curiosity and conformity is not important.  So, if it is important for us, how much are we dealing with it, how much are we welcoming it?

I was talking to a chemical giant a couple of weeks ago, and the person was talking about their quality manual and they said, "If we have one line of changes in our quality manual requires 700 approvals, we're not going to start, we're not even going there".  But I think HR has a beautiful role to play here in drivers for culture.  And if culture is important and curiosity is important in that culture, then HR will find a way in making sure that there is.  And also, curiosity for others, and not only asking that question at management level, but also asking that question to every Mary and Jeff in the company, and maybe we can learn something, and maybe it's a vulnerable question that we might not always like, or not sure about what the answer is going to be.  But that's great.

Then also curiosity about the world, "How much am I interested in HR in internal stuff; but also am I interested in trends in the industry and new products that are coming out?  And how much can I speak the language of my customers?  And how many of my customers have I visited in the last month; and am I interested in how they look at everything?"  So, there's many angles to curiosity, I think.  And then you can trickle it down to recruitment and promotion and other dimensions, I'm sure you can.

David Green: A fascinating subject.  I know the listeners are going to want to dig in a bit further and find out more about your work.  Firstly, thanks for being a guest on the Digital HR Leaders podcast.  How can listeners find out more about you, follow you on social media, maybe find out more about the Global Curiosity Institute and the book maybe as well?

Stefaan van Hooydonk: My main feed would be LinkedIn.  I'm trying to get better at all of the other social media areas, but that's a learning journey for me.  You can also go to the website, globalcuriosityinstitute.com, and there you can find the assessments and a number of podcasts and other things.  Then the book, I'm so thrilled the book was bestseller in the beginning and still is, that people are interested in.  It's available on all global platforms in either e-book version, or paperback, and that's often a great starting point for people to get more curious about curiosity.

David Green: That's a great way to end it, getting more curious about curiosity.  Stefaan, it's been fantastic to have you on the show.  I'm even more curious than I was before, so you've certainly achieved that with me anyway.  So, thank you very much and, yeah, look forward to connecting with you again in the future.

Stefaan van Hooydonk: Thanks for having me, David.