Patterning curiosity

Peder Söderlind pinged me on a LinkedIn post, which picked up a fair following, in part because of its very intriguing opening sentence: Doing my best to be a bit braver and trust my own thinking.  The link takes you to an article that seeks to view curiosity as a collective movement.   It coincided with my picking up an article contrasting hallucination with bullshit in the context of ChatGBT.  There are links to the treatment of hallucination in  Andy Clark’s latest and best book today, namely The Experience Machine.   I’m not planning to elaborate on any of those three; they all reward more detailed reading, but I acknowledge the inspiration for this post.

One key aspect of human sense-making is our curiosity when we see an anomaly in a pattern; Clark suggests that without those anomalies, we don’t engage in higher cognitive functions anyway.  You can see the evolutionary value; anomalies represent threat and opportunity.   Our work with SenseMaker® displays patterns of meaning over multiple responses and then tends to focus people on anomalies or outliers.  If I present a description of a current situation to all my employees and ask them to interpret it, then I have a good chance of finding the 17% who have seen a gorilla.  More importantly, they are likely to call those people in. In contrast, if the same individuals turn up one day and claim to have seen something that everyone else is ignoring, then they, in turn, are likely to be ignored, assuming they get past the gatekeepers in the first place.

Suppose we want people to see things differently. In that case, we first need to make them curious about anomalies, and it’s even more robust if we contrast their interpretation of the situation with that of other people:  you saw it like this, they saw it like that, what do you think it means?  The parallel process is so much more effective than simply getting people to agree in a workshop that they will respect other people’s views.  You create a practice to trigger curiosity; you don’t tell or try to teach people to be curious.

I remember that, in KM days, I used to give a simple example of different types of search.  If I knew what I was looking for, I used Amazon (then ordered from the local bookshop); if I wanted to investigate a subject, I went to the relevant section of an academic bookshop, but if I was ever really stuck, I would go to Foyles.  Now, this is the old Foyles before it was modernised.  There was no rhyme or reason for the way books were placed in the shop, and sometimes, an obscure book would call out to you from an ad-hoc stack on a staircase between floors.  I’m not joking here; it happened several times.  It was wonderfully messy, and you found things that excited curiosity out of that mess.  Exploring without purpose is something I see my now-year-old granddaughter doing every time she encounters something new.  There is a family heuristic that if I, my mother, when she was alive, or my daughter spotted a bookshop, everyone else in the party might as well go and find somewhere to have a coffee because we won’t be back for a bit.  Managing for serendipity and/or surprise is part and parcel of what it is to be human; we don’t want some recommendation based on what most other people have used or referenced; we seek the opportunity to be original.

Reading a book is so much more rewarding to the imagination than seeing someone else interpretation in a movie or series – although that also has value.  We get to understand narrative patterns, but an author who can break those patterns will make us think.  Sometimes, the flat screen can do this better – remember the Red Wedding.   Familiar patterns save energy; unfamiliar patterns require energetic responses, so not everyone will take that path.  If only everyone read broadly, innovation in organisations would be less of a problem.  I’m generally reading three books at the same time.  One from history, currently a book on witch trials, with one on the Weimar Republic ready once I have finished nether planned just a casual pickup).  A second from fantasy or science fiction,  currently Jasper Fforde’s Red Side Story, the long,  oh so long-awaited sequel to Shades of Grey , and just before that, I completed Tchaikovsky’s The Final Architecture trilogy.  Then, something more directly related to work currently Donna West’s Narrative as Dialectic Abduction with Castellano and Gerrits’s mammoth and expensive Atlas of Complexity to Follow.  All of them contribute to thinking about current issues or problems.

But I was brought up in a book-reading family, expected to read to hold my own around the dinner table. That was complemented by a Welsh Grammar School education, where the expectation was that you would read in all subjects, not just the ones you were studying.   Not everyone is that lucky, and it’s not the only way to acquire knowledge.   Any approach to innovation and discovery in an organisation must recognise the diversity of backgrounds.   We need to do this in a way which doesn’t privilege the expert or the facilitator, more on that when I get to the end of this series.

The banner picture is cropped from an original etching by Jan Luyken of the “Library and cabinet of curiosities of the Grand Duke of Tuscany” obtained from the ever useful website of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.   The opening image was created using AI and editing and is by Çiğdem Onur from Pixabay.