Critical Curiosity
Welcome to Love Mondays, a weekly newsletter designed as a 3-minute hit to fire up the other 10,077 minutes of your week.
Surprised?
The more times we circle the sun, the less wonderment we tend to find in the world. We stop being surprised on the journey, not because we get better at flying the plane, but because we put ourselves on autopilot. Critical curiosity is the adult version of childlike wonderment. And it’s curiously wonderful!
When was the last time you were really surprised?
Write it down.
Consider: what parts of your day happen on autopilot?
Practice: disrupting your diary, your habits, your expectations this week
Decide to: look for the gaps between perception and reality, and embrace these as an opportunity for critical curiosity
Critical curiosity and conscious development
Organisations don’t transform the world. People do.
Leaders, like anyone else, are habitual beings that protect their worldview and the meaning they derive from it. In Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Peter Drucker dedicated a chapter to incongruities, the mental gaps between perception and reality. Drucker saw these gaps as an invitation to innovate. At its core, entrepreneurship is an exploration in critical curiosity, finding the opportunity in between familiar spaces to create something new, something different.
Too often as leaders we show up to our working week with a preset mindset about what needs to be achieved and how we will achieve it. Philosopher-educator Paulo Freire argued that critical curiosity serves as an important catalyst to critical consciousness and a more entrepreneurial society. Progress can only occur in imbalance. As detailed by Kenneth Mikkelsen below, leaders might focus on four shifts to view the world through fresh eyes. Action, by its nature, must destroy equilibrium.
Life is a series of small surprises, waiting to be noticed under the weight of our great expectations. Unexpect the expected this week!