Elaine Rumboll

I had the good fortune to attend the Geekretreat (Stanford Valley) on the weekend. I must say that I was rather sceptical to begin with. It promised to be a convergence of likeminded people carefully selected to share their ideas, insights and solutions for education and techonology in South Africa. I must say that after having attended I am, to be frank, rather blown away. What has really piqued my curiosity is how the space was used to get the most out of the attendees. What I really liked was the idea that no one was there as a tourist. So often at events, the critic in one’s head plays a running narrative on what’s not working and what is failing to land. It is remarkable how getting every voice in the room changes that.

Each person had to volunteer to contribute something. It was  set up in  manner which is called Unconference.

Instead of the usual predetermined slots with speakers and topics confirmed, delegates were encouraged to choose from a range of areas they could contribute to. Choices included being able to give a Lightening Talk ( a 5 minute impromptu speech on  a topic which you considered worthwhile to share), a skills share (20 minutes on a skill which you could teach those attending) or a talking heads session (where you spoke for 20 minutes on a topic that was close to your heart - participants were given a piece of paper with three numbers on it - one number per talking head so talks attended were based on a random selection). I am an ambassador for the Talking Heads event which is part of the Infecting the City Project in Cape Town so I must say that if there was any criticism of the use of the Talking Heads concept it was that it didn’t come close to the calibre of what is presented at the real deal. But this is an aside and pretty irrelevant in the grander scheme of things. I have returned to work invigorated by the possibility of being able to use a mobile enabled learning platform for executive education courses at the GSB and all fired up to run an open course on Curiosity as a Leadership Practice at the P2P University this year.

I also got to meet some really insightful people and I feel hopeful, really hopeful about the future of technology-enabled education in this country. Thanks for the invitation - it has truly been worthwhile.

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Agility is being viewed as a critical skill for 21st Century Leaders. One of the components that helps create an agile mind and attitude is curiosity. But how exactly does one go about creating a curious state? Here are three useful mantras which might enable your journey of discovery – one, be fascinated by your own ignorance; two, answers don’t change the world, questions do; and three, go slow to go fast.

Be fascinated by your own ignorance

Nobel Prize winner Ernest Rutherford supposedly said, “I am fascinated by my own ignorance”, and he is believed to have had a practice with his team where they had to report back daily on what they had observed that they were previously ignorant of.

This activity of noticing what it is we do not know is driven to a great degree by curiosity. Albert Einstein himself is said to have remarked, “I have no particular talents, I am just passionately curious”.

Fascination with what we don’t know, however, is to many executives a daunting and frightening proposition.

The demands of business today are such that decisions need to be made quickly – there is no time to explore all possible courses of action, and people therefore end up doing the same things again and again, limiting the possibilities for innovation and change. The executives in charge of making hasty decisions of course prefer to feel secure in their own frames of reference, rather than stimulated by new ones, as this makes quick decision-making much simpler.

But as Dawna Markova points out, “the first thing we need for innovation is fascination with wonder [curiosity in its particularity], we are taught instead to decide… to decide is to kill off all possibilities but one. A good innovational thinker is always exploring the many other possibilities”.

So curiosity can lead to innovation. Great.

A lack of curiosity, on the other hand, according to author of the 2009 book Curious? Todd Kashdan, is a breeding ground for stereotyping and discrimination, inflated confidence and ignorance that can actually lead to poor decision making, dogmatism and rigidity of thought.

Becoming stuck in one paradigm, only seeing the world through a single lens and ignoring multiple perspectives puts a severe limitation on our ability to innovate.

Closing the door on creativity and diversity in the name of speed also poses a threat to businesses constantly on the look out for the next competitive advantage in the 21st Century. If you aren’t being curious, you can be sure that somewhere out there someone else is at your expense.

Answers don’t change the world, questions do

The world we now operate in is now so full of uncertainty and change that it is impossible for anyone in business to hold all the answers. And even if you have the right answer today, it might not be the right one tomorrow.

There is such a wealth of information now available that answers of all kinds exist in abundance. Today’s more valuable skill, therefore, is the ability to steer a way through this information-laden universe by asking insightful questions.

Take Google as a simple example. Using different keywords or phrases to search for the same thing can bring up vastly different search results. What you ask for is directly related to the quality of information and the answers that you get back.

So, it is the ability to ask the right questions that is emerging as a key leadership competency in the 21st Century and recruiters are increasingly listing it as a capability they value.

Go slow to go fast

Easier said than done, one might be inclined to think.

However, slowing down is probably one of the most important things we need to re-train ourselves to do if we are to cultivate a more curious state of being. The frenetic pace of life today doesn’t seem to allow for it, but going slow essentially means having time to think.

According to a recent article by Carl Honore titled, “In Praise of Slow Thinking” published in the Huffington Post, “the greatest thinkers in history certainly knew the value of shifting into a lower gear. Milan Kundera talked about ‘the wisdom of slowness’. Albert Einstein spent hours just staring into space in his office at Princeton University. Charles Darwin described himself as a ‘slow thinker’.”

All these great minds recognised the importance of having time to think, to mull things over, to consider all options. If they didn’t, we might never have had the opportunity to enjoy the results of their world-changing work.

Leaders and executives, therefore, need to integrate a space for thinking into their daily working lives in order to realise the benefits of a truly curious state of mind. Without slowing down, they will continually fail to innovate.

So what now?

Reflecting on the way of being in the world that many of us now unconsciously and automatically inhabit reveals that, worryingly, we are slipping into a robotic way of living and working where the emphasis is on keeping up, rather than setting the pace.There is no time to plan, no time to reflect, only time to do – and this is manifesting itself in something akin to a “flight or fight” response to life’s demands.

In the process we are missing so much, including the discovery of our own true potential and possibilities for innovation.

Rather, let’s slow down a bit and get really curious – we may find ourselves joining the realms of great thinkers and innovators who certainly knew how to do so.

cons

This is an abridged version of the blogpost by Elaine Rumboll for Thought Leader

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A Song of Hope

When deceit is rewarded
When betrayal is customary
When enemies gain power
When dreams are burnt by malice
When the chatter of others is alien
When hope is a foreign thing
When beauty ceases to be gentle
When there are no longer mornings
textured with familiarity

When despair remains despair

Be still and watch at your window

Listen for the sounds of richer times
gathering and conspiring in a revolt
with a might which will flood the mountains
and overthrow this season

Click here to download the entire manuscript of The Child Machine for free.

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It has been mooted that the ability to learn is far more important than any one nugget of knowledge (Near Future Laboratory, 2009). Increasingly, the assumption that the ability to learn faster than anyone else will be the key competitive advantage for those wanting to succeed in the 21^st century is becoming commonplace. This kind of thinking is being reflected in practise where many are working longer hours, taking shorter breaks and multi tasking more than they have ever before. In fact, research on urban behaviour reflects that we are walking 10% faster and talking 20% faster than we did in the last decade.

What are the consequences of this drive to ‘go faster’ for the future of leaning? Already we are seeing organisational requests for contact hours to be shortened significantly, on leadership development programmes. Much of the responsibility for the uptake of knowledge is becomingly increasingly the responsibility of the learner in their assigned projects back into the work environment.My response to this is that going Faster kills Innovation. It forces us to focus on what we know. It creates Killing Fields. People who Know there is a different way are frightened  to voice their opinion, and in this system, cut themselves and their vision off from what could be possible. It is a desperate and ill-informing response to the Attention Economy - a newly understood space which should really generate collaboration and collegial support. Innovation  is concerned, or should be concerned with the Fascination with Wonder. Anything else lacks courage. 

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This is the abstract for a paper I am currently writing for a conference on The Future of Learning - What excites me about the notion of curiosity as an area for study is that it is an arena which is so often spoken of as something which re-enervates but is also an area which has so many conflicting opinions about what really consitiutes its becoming.

I suppose that if one is going to undertake an investigation of a field of study it is important to put a stick in the ground. For me, curiosity is something which helps to increase the quality of our attention. Interestingly enough I found Todd Kashan had the same idea in his 2009 book on Curiosity? I would really appreciate comments and recommendations for where else to start looking for material on curiosity as a filter for attention.

ABSTRACT
Information consumes attention. In an age of information overload and ‘filter failure’ (Shirky, 2008), human attention has become a scarce resource (Lanham, 2007). In the realm of this attention economy, it is argued that the notion of curiosity emerges as a necessary regenerative foil to this attention deficit. For we enjoy our curiosity even when it is not sated (Schmitt & Lahroodi, 2008). Curiosity heightens levels of engagement with information (Harvey et al, 2007) but is paradoxically an effective response to regenerating attention, specifically in organisational contexts where attention is constantly under erasure. Thus the very nature of curiosity is a paradoxical enabler of learning. It requires the subject to both suspend judgment in the sense of Otto Scharmer’s Open Mind (2007) and simultaneously stimulates critical thinking through engaging with what is perceived as “the spiral of curiosity” (Harvey et al, 2007: 44). The paper concludes by evidencing ways in which curiosity can be construed, harnessed and applied as a continuous enabler in the learning mix. The Attention Audit, undertaken on many of our leadership interventions will be discussed to illustrate this point.

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I have been mulling with the idea of curiosity as one of the few responses one can use to regenerate attention, specifically in organisational contexts where attention is constantly under erasure.   I came across this gem the other day on four reasons why curiosity is important and how to develop it. As someone who has a deep fascination in transversing disciplines, curiosity seems like one of the few beacons which has relevance in almost every area I explore.  As an enabler of my own learning and also as a way to enter places which I am unfamilar with. My goal for 2009 as part of my PhD work is to try and build some kind of toolkit that may be used in organisations to regenerate attention through the mechanism of curiosity. Not sure where I am even going to begin this genealogical journey but I don’t think it is going to be in the annals of management literature. I think I am going to start by sitting in a park watching children play. 

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I have decided to continue using my blog as a space to share thoughts around my PhD topic on the Collision between Web 2.0/3? and Leadership Development in organisations. We have created a blog for the ongoing Business Acumen for Artists programme at http://gsbexecedblog.uct.ac.za/baa/

So those wanting to enrich their own artistic journey through a deeper undestanding of business acumen need just go there for updates and insights. It is a wonderfully engaging group of artists we have this year and I’m sure they won’t mind you popping in and posting your own stumbling blocks and/or insights and questions. My blog is going to be solely around the question posed in the title.

I have decided to change my topic which was previously on Ecovation for a number of reasons…none of which I want to go into now. But I think this collision is one which is a good fit because leadership development is the area I work in and design programmes around, I am increasingly involved in open source and I see the visible changes that mass collaboration is effecting on senior leaders in organisations. So deep breath - into the wild…

Any leftfield Jack London commentary to start me on my journey?

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I have had a bee in my bonnet for a couple of months now regarding the implications of You and Them colliding in the marketplace of words. If blogging is now becoming an arena as easily accessible for corporate messages as for individual thoughts, what then happens to Tone? The Cluetrain Manifesto is clear that the tone used by Business needs to change but what does this mean for the way we engage and what will the impact be on the way individuals communicate their messages. Will these become more formal and business messages become more chatty? As we become increasingly subject to the tyranny of increased partial attention disorder, messages have had to become increasingly stickier. If You and Them start sounding the same, will this create a downturn interest in reading blogs or will there emerge a different tone to distinguish both? I would really love to have your thoughts on this as it is a topic which I think could have far reaching implications for the way we market and meaningfully engage.

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I am currently in the process of attempting to hone what it is that impacts on the way leaders manage. Obviously this is informed by the context in which they lead. But it is no longer a context which can just be cut and pasted. I have been working with my partner, Dave Duarte on identifying and understanding what the issues are which will inform and drive a new leadership style. These have been my BETA conclusions and I would love the input from others especially as we have to present these findings next week to a bunch of senior executives of a not insignificant organisation.  

They relate to five arenas: 

• Community Based Economies – the articulation from commodity to product to service to experience as the base of a community driven experience
• Beta Testing – the realisation that consumers are forgiving and that we are Allowed to play in the arenas that may not immediately yield the Perfect but at least there is an allowance for the exciting which with their input may well become the important – God gets in through the cracks.
• Social Networks – Getting away from the old adage which says we need to know everyone and instead focusing on those nodes of a network which really influence well and with the least effort
• Ecological Innovation – Drawing on lessons from the environment which not only make us feel good but which genuinely harness profit in a way which does not strip mine the environment
• Attention – The realization that the exhausting attempt to keep up with everything serves no one and attempting to use tools which hone our understanding of what value really means for our significant engagement in the world.

We are attempting to use these five places as a way to harness a different and important 21^st century sensibility. I would welcome your insights.  

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