What does curiosity mean as a company value?

Asking the question nobody has asked, while the answer can still change something. A question raised after a decision is interesting; the same one raised beforehand is useful.

How do you recognise curiosity at work?

Quote the question and say what it changed. Praising somebody’s inquisitive nature gives the rest of the team nothing to repeat, and a question is repeatable.

Is curiosity a real business value or a soft one?

It is the value that stops arrangements outliving their reasons. Almost every process nobody can justify survived because no one asked why it existed while there was still somebody around who knew.

Should you recognise a question that produced bad news?

Especially then. A question whose answer is inconvenient took a cost the asker did not have to take, and a team that only celebrates comfortable findings gets fewer of the other kind.

Company values

Curiosity

Curiosity gets recognised as a personality trait, which is why the recognition rarely tells anybody anything useful.

The question is the artefact

Recognition for curiosity usually describes the person. Inquisitive, always asking questions, never takes anything at face value.

None of it can be copied. The question itself can, and “why do we do it that way” turning out to have the answer “somebody left in 2021” is a story a team will actually repeat.

Thank the uncomfortable answer

A question that produced good news costs nothing. A question whose answer was that the feature nobody wanted to measure is not being used costs the asker something real.

If only the first kind gets recognised, the second kind stops being asked.

How you would know

Asks why it is like that: Questions an arrangement everyone else has stopped seeing.
Goes and looks: Reads the code, watches the customer, checks the data instead of reasoning from assumption.
Follows the odd result: Chases the number that does not fit rather than rounding it away.
Learns the neighbouring job: Understands enough of somebody else’s function to ask a better question about it.

6 messages that name it

You asked why we do it that way. The answer was that somebody left in 2021.
Peer
The punchline is the value.
Thank you for actually watching a customer use it. We had been guessing for two years.
Manager
Contrasts observation with assumption.
Sofia noticed one number was consistently 3% off and would not let it go. It was a real bug.
Manager
Recognises persistence on something easy to dismiss.
You learned enough about how support works to ask the question that reframed the roadmap.
Manager
Ties cross-function learning to a concrete outcome.
Thanks for reading the vendor’s docs properly. Everyone else was quoting the sales deck.
Peer
Dry, specific, comparative.
You asked what happens if the list is empty. It was the only case we had not handled.
Peer
A tiny question with a shipping consequence.

What its absence looks like

Where curiosity is absent, arrangements survive long after their reason has left the company, and odd numbers get rounded until they become incidents.

Recognising it well

Recognise the question, not the temperament. “You are so curious” is a compliment about a person; the question they asked is a thing other people can copy.
Thank the inconvenient answer. Somebody whose question produced an uncomfortable finding has done the work and taken the cost.
Watch for questions that never get asked twice. If nobody follows up on “why is it like that”, the value is decorative.

Questions people ask

What does curiosity mean as a company value?: Asking the question nobody has asked, while the answer can still change something. A question raised after a decision is interesting; the same one raised beforehand is useful.
How do you recognise curiosity at work?: Quote the question and say what it changed. Praising somebody’s inquisitive nature gives the rest of the team nothing to repeat, and a question is repeatable.
Is curiosity a real business value or a soft one?: It is the value that stops arrangements outliving their reasons. Almost every process nobody can justify survived because no one asked why it existed while there was still somebody around who knew.
Should you recognise a question that produced bad news?: Especially then. A question whose answer is inconvenient took a cost the asker did not have to take, and a team that only celebrates comfortable findings gets fewer of the other kind.