The Oxford English Dictionary defines curiosity as: “A strong desire to know or learn something”

If you develop curiosity in your day to day and your work life, your learning speed, ability to deal with ambiguity and your creativity will all increase.

You can develop your curiosity simply by questioning things that you are told, by asking “why?” because context matters. Understanding the context as to why things are done the way that they are is critical to gaining a fuller understanding of a process. You will discover that sometimes accepted norms made sense in times gone by, when the context was different but may not actually make sense in the current context.

Here are a few stories that truly illustrate why curiosity is so important.

Her husband walks into the kitchen and sees the turkey in the sink and asks her what the dish rack is for.

She tells him that her mother had always done that when thawing the turkey in the sink.

The following morning, Jenny’s mother arrives early to help with the final dinner preparations for the day and asks her daughter how things are going.

Jenny says, “Fine mum; I have everything ready to go in the oven. I even remembered to put the rack over the turkey last night.” 

Her mother looks back at her, a confused look on her face. “What are you talking about?” she asked.

Jenny replied “You always made sure to put the dish rack over the turkey when it was thawing in the sink so I did the same“

Her mother laughs and says “Yes but honey, we had cats!”

So you can see how norms and practices that once made sense within the original context in which they were made, but when removed from that context, make no sense at all. In today’s world, where progress and change are happening at ever increasing speeds, norms formed by the contexts of todays world will soon become irrelevant as well.

This is obviously a light hearted example where the cost of low curiosity has little impact, however there are times where low curiosity can cost people their lives or make someone a Billionaire!

Although at the time many mothers delivered at home, one in 4 of those who had to come to the hospital to deliver due to complications, poverty of illegitimacy lost their lives to a condition known as childbed fever.

He found this mortality rate deeply unsettling as the hospital was the place where people were supposed to come to be healed by doctors trained in the latest medical practices of the time.

The experienced doctors and indeed the chief medical officer at the hospital seemed unperturbed by the high mortality rates of the new mothers because they believed that the disease was unpreventable.

Semmelweis, unsatisfied by what he was being told, took it upon himself to investigate the deaths even after receiving strong objections from the chief medical officer.

He observed a huge difference between the mortality rates of mothers delivered by the doctors versus those delivered by the midwives. He conjectured that the doctors must be doing something differently than the midwives during delivery but he observed broadly the same practices.

During his investigation, he scrutinised everything he could think of in an attempt to explain the difference but none yielded a definitive answer.

It wasn’t until the death of a fellow doctor, who died of what appeared to be childbed fever that he found what he was looking for. The doctor had cut himself on a scalpel he was using to dissect a woman who had died of childbed fever. This lead Semmelweis to realise that it was the doctors themselves who were infecting the patients as they would conduct autopsies in the mornings and then deliver babies in the afternoons, often without washing their hands or changing their clothes.

At the time bacteria were unknown but Semmelweis theorised that the doctors must be carrying invisible particles of decaying organic matter on their hands from the mornings autopsies. He immediately required that anyone coming to examine the women on his ward wash their hands with chlorinated lime before doing so.

This simple solution reduced the mortality rate to under 2% on his ward.

Unfortunately his solution was met with a lot of resistance because it implied that the doctors were themselves killing the patients.

This story highlights the importance of staying curious and using experiments and data to learn more about the current situation in order to derive theories about what might be a better way of doing things.

Nick’s frustration at not being able to easily and efficiently buy the shoes he wanted turned to curiosity as he wondered whether it would be possible to purchase the shoes online (it wasn’t). Realised that there may be an opportunity here to give customers like him what they wanted (to save time and energy finding shoes).

At the time, online shopping was in its infancy and people told him that no one would want to buy shoes on the internet. So Nick set out to test that theory.

He went in to local shoe shops and asked whether he could take photographs of the shoes they had, with the promise that if the shoe sold online, he would return at a later date and purchase the shoes at full price from that shop.

Many of the shop owners agreed and he proceeded to test whether people would indeed like to buy shoes online. Shoesite.com was born and in 2006 was acquired by Amazon.com for $1.2 Billion.

Now that is a huge return on curiosity!

My rule of thumb is that before accepting something as being true or a constant, make sure you ask enough questions (and conduct enough tests where required) to learn enough about it so that you not only understand what is done, but also why it is done. Armed with this knowledge, you can then go on to make it better than it was before.