Curiosity in Leadership

I was on the Olympic Peninsula recently, celebrating my niece’s 5th birthday. Before the party, I took two of the girls (aged 5 and 3) down the street to the local playground. Both girls tested their mettle against new challenges, and showed off their latest tricky tricks. As we were walking back to their house, the 5 year old stopped to tie her shoe –one of her most up-to-date skills. While stooping over to grab the laces, she looked out at the world sideways and upside down, and noticed that things looked radically different from that angle. Celebrating her discovery with her, (and remembering that sideways and upside down were a couple of my favorite angles to view the world when I was her age) all three of us spent the next block and a half walking crouched down, with our heads upside down near our knees, peering out at the world from this delightful angle. Unfortunately --since we almost fell off the curb-- I decided that at least one of us should probably be conscious of safety, so we wouldn’t veer off the sidewalk into oncoming traffic. Since I was technically the adult, I reluctantly accepted that role. The two of them wandered several more blocks with heads down and sideways, viewing life through that interesting perspective, before moving on to new discoveries.

Curiosity and a playful attitude towards life are some of the greatest lessons children can teach us. So often we reach a certain level of mastery and believe we know everything there is to know about life, our job, or our organization. Our lives get so busy with the importance of daily tasks and schedules, we rarely take time to shift our perspective, to listen to other viewpoints, or to simply breathe and notice the beauty, surprise and lessons that surround us in little things each day. Unfortunately, without new perspectives we stay stuck in our attachments to the way things are or the way we think things are supposed to be and miss new possibility.

A large part of the focus at KIC Coaching is about getting curious . . . about yourself, other people, your organization, the world. Albert Einstein stated that you can never solve a problem on the same level it was created. Marcel Proust opined that the only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. Did you know that Einstein’s theory of relativity resulted from a question he had wondered about as a teenager: “What would the universe look like if I was riding on a beam of light?”

I encourage you to take a lesson from the wisdom of my nieces, (and Einstein and Proust.) Take a different route to work. Listen –and really hear—your child’s perspective on life. Look for a different angle on a common argument. Re-frame a question –one for which you don’t have an answer—by examining the assumptions that are embedded in it. Try something completely new and different with no goal except to learn something. In other words, simply change up your routine. You never know what discoveries you might bring to light!