They say curiosity killed the cat, but given the turbulence of the world today, many leaders ask too few questions. Perhaps overwhelmed by the chaos, many leaders follow “best practices,” protocols, and history. But as the saying goes that is often attributed to Einstein, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
Curiosity is more than a personality quirk. It’s a skill, rooted in neuroscience. And it can be a leader’s superpower.
When we sense a gap between what we know and what we need to know, our brain’s reward system lights up, giving us a hit of dopamine. Being inquisitive doesn’t just feel good; it makes us learn better and faster. It’s a guilt-free dopamine hit that also happens to be fantastic for business. While it’s innate, training and environments can strengthen a leader’s curiosity muscles.
The business case for asking, “Why?”
Curiosity not only improves happiness, but it also drives leadership and business success in several ways:
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It drives innovation. Curiosity spurs organizations and entrepreneurs to create. The SPANX empire didn’t start in a boardroom; it started with Sara Blakely asking a simple, curious question: “Why are there no undergarments I can wear under white pants?” Her curiosity led her to cut the feet off a pair of pantyhose, and in that moment of experimentation, a billion-dollar idea was born. A complacent leader might just wear jeans.
It future-proofs your company. When Satya Nadella took over Microsoft, he famously transformed its brutal “know-it-all” culture into a humble “learn-it-all” culture. This shift from certainty to curiosity drove the pivot to cloud and AI, making Azure a titan and propelling the company past a $3 trillion valuation. In contrast, the brilliant but incurious leaders at Blackberry dismissed the iPhone, clinging to keyboards while the world went touchscreen. A similar lack of questioning hurt Kodak, Blockbuster, and Yahoo.
It slashes the turnover tax. Disengaged employees walk, and replacing them is wildly expensive. Gallup estimates the “turnover tax” costs companies up to 200% of a manager’s salary to replace them. With voluntary exits in averaging 13.5% annually, that’s a potential trillion-dollar problem in the U.S. alone. A curious culture is a secret weapon against this. When questions are treated as assets, not annoyances, it signals psychological safety. It makes people feel valued. When Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan introduced an “inspired, curious, and unbossed” philosophy backed by major investments in learning, company turnover rate declined to three-fourths the industry average.
3 traits of a company culture that lacks curiosity
Before you can fix a problem, you must see it. Low-curiosity cultures have a few common traits. Do any of these sound familiar?
Efficiency worship: The obsession with speed and predictable outcomes starves exploration. How much time do you spend talking about performance marketing and lead-generation versus value-creation? When every minute must be justified against a known deliverable, there’s no room for what Amazon’s Jeff Bezos calls “wandering”—the essential, inefficient counterbalance to operational excellence. If “that’s not on the roadmap” is a common refrain, you’re worshiping efficiency at the expense of discovery.
Meeting monologues: Are meetings a forum for genuine discussion or someone’s soapbox? If questions are treated as interruptions, you don’t have a meeting culture; you have a monologue culture.
Fear of looking dumb: This is the most potent curiosity killer. It’s the silence that follows someone’s “basic” question. It’s the hesitation to pitch a half-baked idea for fear of premature judgment. When people are more focused on proving their competence than improving their understanding, they stop taking risks.
Take this curiosity audit
These five questions act as a cultural MRI to reveal how curiosity is treated in your culture:
1. “What happened to the people involved in a failed project that was well-intentioned?”
This question cuts directly to the heart of psychological safety. Innovation and failure are two sides of the same coin. How you treat failure is the clearest signal you send about whether risk-taking is truly welcome. At Pixar, the legendary “brain trust” famously holds blameless postmortems on struggling films. Unlike our perception of Hollywood, candid feedback is used to diagnose the story’s problems, not assign blame to the director. Failure is treated as a valuable dataset, not a career-limiting move.
2. “Describe how a novel, unconventional idea gets from a spark to a funded project. Where does it usually get stuck?”
Every company has ideas. Curiosity-stifling companies have an invisible maze of bureaucracy or say things like, “Let’s put together a committee to explore that.” Intuit doesn’t wait for fully formed business cases. Its “Design for Delight” sanctioned a path for small teams to run rapid, low-cost experiments based on customer insights and unconventional ideas.
3. “Think about the last time someone asked a question that revealed a basic gap in their knowledge. How was it received?”
This tests whether you have a proving culture where everyone fakes competence or a humble, learning culture where vulnerability is a prerequisite for growth. The reaction to a “dumb question” says it all.
4. “How do we allocate resources for projects that are purely exploratory?”
A budget is the most honest strategy document you have. If 100 percent of your resources are tied to guaranteed, short-term returns, then exploration is just an unfunded mandate.
Viagra, the Post-it Note, and Slack weren’t planned products. They came from serendipity or failure. 3M (with its 15% time), Lego (with its Leadership Playground), and Gore-Tex (with its “No Jerks” rule) are all notoriously curious cultures and commercial powerhouses.
5. “Tell me about a time a junior employee disagreed with a senior leader in a meeting. What was the vibe?”
This is a stress test for psychological safety across a power ladder. If people can’t speak truth to power, you’re only getting the ideas of the highest-paid people in the room.
Becoming the Chief Curiosity Officer
Being a great leader, one that builds a culture of growth, takes many skills. But it starts by asking more questions than you answer. Give permission others to do the same. As technology, politics, and the economy reshape our businesses, commercial success is in the hands of the restlessly inquisitive.
Because in business, curiosity never killed anything. It’s the deadly comfort of complacency that should be feared.