Seth Goldenberg - Radical Curiosity: Questioning Commonly Held Beliefs to Imagine Flourishing Futures

On October 4, 2021, the tenth anniversary of Steve Jobss passing, Jony Ive penned a moving op-ed in The Wall Street Journal commemorating his friend. As Apples chief design officer, Ive enjoyed a special relationship with Jobs: an intimate collaboration rooted in mutual admiration of the creative process. He revealed what he believed to be his defining characteristic: curiosity.

He was without doubt the most inquisitive human I have ever met. His insatiable curiosity was not limited or distracted by his knowledge or expertise, nor was it casual or passive. It was ferocious, energetic and restless. His curiosity was practiced with intention and rigor. Many of us have an innate predisposition to be curious. I believe that after a traditional education, or working in an environment with many people, curiosity is a decision requiring intent and discipline.

Ive elegantly articulates a portrait of Steve Jobs embodying what it means to live an intentional, rigorous life of curiosity. Such a life is characterized by an insatiable desire to interrogate the unknown. Ive continued:

In larger groups our conversations gravitate towards the tangible, the measurable. It is more comfortable, far easier and more socially acceptable talking about what is known. Being curious and exploring tentative ideas were far more important to Steve than being socially acceptable. Our curiosity begs that we learn. And for Steve, wanting to learn was far more important than wanting to be right.

Society is deeply uncomfortable with curiosity as a way of living, leading, and doing daily business. Yet, ironically, curiosity is the fuel to transformative leadership and value creation.

Our modern world has been inadvertently designed to eradicate curiosity. And at a time when every sector of business and social system comprising society is facing existential challenges, the potential extinction of curiosity is an emergency. We need questions now more than ever.

Society has trained itself to move swiftly toward solutions. So fast, that too often we leap straight into answers before knowing the questions. We skate on the surface, misdiagnosing problems, assuming that every nail needs the same hammer. We are seduced by quick fixes, which somehow reassure us that weve done something, anything. The fact that a transaction has occurred becomes more important than whether the transaction yields positive impact. These transactions have become the heartbeat of a marketplace that values doing more than thinking. Weve designed an economy that rewards the mere swing of the hammer. Even if we miss.

The Croatian Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich described this phenomenon fifty years ago in his book Deschooling Society. In it he proposes that we have conflated the act of doing with the outcome itself:

They school [students and citizens] to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby schooled to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is schooled to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work.

These insights are even more relevant today than when they were articulated half a century ago. Today, it may not merely be that we confuse process with substance; rather, our failure to question our processes or interrogate our actions may be symptomatic of a more significant concern: Curiosity is an endangered species.

The extinction of curiosity stifles our imaginations, paralyzing our ability to author better futures.

Without a robust culture of curiosity, imagination is rendered impotent, and all were doing is surviving the day, administering transactions, on autopilot, surrendering our agency, and perpetuating an ineffective status quo. We become managers of the end state of a problem-solution continuum. Our roles become reduced to administrators of predetermined solutions rather than interrogators of the unknown. Consuming the choices that others have made for us, relinquishing our right to be the author of our own story. We assert agency over our future only when we challenge what is known.

Challenging what was regarded as wisdom by those before us forces us to develop a deep appreciation of existing knowledge while simultaneously revealing potential gaps or faults in the prevailing thinking. The identification of these faults and the creation of novel bridges to traverse those gaps is the invention of new knowledge. We contribute to the story of the future by updating the collective wisdom enshrined in previous chapters. The combination of inquiry and invention is the culture of curiosity that has become endangered, on the verge of extinction. And this costs us dearly, both as individuals and as a society.

We live within constraints we cannot see, rejoicing in outcomes we believe we have greater influence over than we really do. We fail to realize that we have drifted far downstream from the origin of inquiry, limiting the potential impact we aspire to create.

In fact, weve come to embrace this limited domain with great pride. In casual conversation, we hear platitudes like Ideas are a dime a dozen. A bias for action or a reputation for being an action-oriented leader is worn like a badge of honor. These are all indications of how society has come to devalue questioning and overvalue doing.

Over the course of the twentieth century, knowledge has become hyper segregated, specialized, industrialized, and routinized. Success came to be associated with production, turning the process of thinking into a transactional activity, valuable only insofar as it enabled the production of commodified answers.