Make Curiosity Pay

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Make Curiosity Pay

February 2, 2011. By Peter Lloyd

I welcome the evolution away from authoritarian leadership and toward its more democratic counterpart that thrives within enlightened companies around the world. Over the past few decades, it’s been out with the old guard. Their egress has been too slow for my likes, but the top-down management model is definitely on its way out. As with any example of evolution, the driver of change has been survival.

The old way, built on the military chain-of-command model, may work well on the battlefield, inside dictatorships, and in the offices of Mad Men, but new ways of working have made old school management unsuitable for success today and tomorrow. The newer way encourages creativity and creativity drives discovery, innovation, and invention. Who does not understand now that innovation wins the day?

Viewing business competition as a theater in some sort of corporate war, the old guard drove invention and innovation with a heavy hand. The motivators they used—fear, intimidation, and punishment—don’t work so well in an environment where encouragement, recognition, and creative freedom deliver better results.

In cooperation with positive motivation, new tools enable us to invent and innovate at an incredible pace. Tools like global crowdsourcing, collective intelligence. social networking, and instant worldwide communication. Today great ideas can go public and start making money before uninspired managers can reject them. Even the people holding the purse strings have learned the value of the free flow of ideas.

As a promoter of creativity, I applaud the move to encouragement and freedom over punishment and deprivation. I see it in and outside of business. A study conducted in Spain has demonstrated that authoritarian parenting makes for insecure children. See: Authoritarian behavior leads to insecure people. As kids raised in more supportive homes reach our boardrooms and replace those raised with deprivation and strict rules, we see fewer bosses mismanaging their employees. More managers eager to turn creativity loose manage our most innovative enterprises.

How to Make Curiosity Pay
photo of ahmed zewail

Nobel laureate Ahmed Zewail writes, “Beware the urge to direct research too closely. History teaches us the value of free scientific inquisitiveness.” Like other creativity gurus, John Poco and Doug Hall, Zewail advocates curiosity-driven research over a tightly managed approach. He advises managers to allow employees to follow their curiosity.

From his article Curiouser and curiouser: managing discovery making, I’ve gleaned and paraphrased three guidelines:

Find the right people, educate and develop them
Encourage an atmosphere of open and free intellectual exchange
Provide the resources they need

“Creative minds and bureaucracies do not work harmoniously together,” warns Ahmed. So never manage creative people with a heavy hand. It limits their creativity. The opposite, curiosity-driven approach leads the way to the discoveries that will write tomorrow’s agenda and shape the future.

See also Think Bottom Up, Not Top Down by Michael Shermer

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.

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