Curiosity tends to get filed under soft skills, somewhere next to communication style and team spirit, treated as a pleasant trait rather than something worth measuring. That framing does not hold up well against the research, which increasingly treats curiosity as a driver of business performance in its own right, tied directly to adaptability, decision quality, and an organization’s ability to keep up with conditions that will not stay still long enough to be planned for perfectly.
The gap between how leaders talk about curiosity and how they actually treat it inside their own organizations is worth examining closely, because most leaders will say they want curious, inquisitive teams while simultaneously building structures that quietly discourage exactly that behavior.
What the Research Actually Shows
Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino’s research, published in the Harvard Business Review, makes a case that goes well beyond the usual praise for curious employees. Her work points to curiosity being far more consequential to enterprise performance than most leaders assume, and it identifies a counterintuitive secondary benefit: organizations with higher levels of curiosity also tend to experience fewer conflicts and reach better group decisions, because people who are genuinely curious about a colleague’s reasoning are less likely to fall into rigid, defensive positions during disagreements.
That combination, better performance alongside less internal friction, is unusual enough to be worth sitting with. Most performance levers come with a tradeoff attached somewhere, and curiosity appears to be one of the rare exceptions.
Why Leaders Unintentionally Shut It Down
If curiosity carries this much upside, the obvious question is why organizations do not have more of it. McKinsey’s research on innovation culture points to fear as the primary answer, finding that leaders often want innovation without realizing they have built the conditions that quietly punish the exploration innovation actually requires, which leaves employees hesitant to ask the kind of open questions that might surface a genuinely new idea.
The scale of that hesitation is striking. McKinsey’s research on innovation found that 85 percent of executives say fear holds back their organization’s innovation efforts often or always, which suggests the barrier to curiosity is rarely a lack of curious people and almost always a culture that has made curiosity feel unsafe to express.
Curiosity Is a Skill, Not Just a Trait
The most useful implication of this research is that curiosity does not have to be treated as something people either have or lack. It can be built the same way any other business skill gets built, through structure, practice, and repetition, rather than left to whichever employees happen to be naturally inquisitive. McKinsey’s research on the innovative mindset describes this same insatiable curiosity to learn as one of the core, teachable attributes shared by the most committed innovators, alongside a tolerance for risk and a comfort with not always succeeding on the first attempt.
FutureThink’s Curiosity and Disruptive Thinking programming is built around this exact premise, giving teams a concrete method for constructing questions that surface more valuable information rather than relying on curiosity to show up on its own. A follow-up piece in this series, on FutureThink’s Killer Question framework, walks through that method step by step.
Building Curiosity Into the System
Leaders looking to close the gap between valuing curiosity and actually cultivating it tend to succeed by treating it as an operating habit rather than a personality trait to hire for once and hope survives the org chart. That means protecting time for exploratory questions before a project’s direction has been locked in, modeling curiosity visibly rather than only encouraging it in others, and creating low-stakes settings where people can practice asking sharper questions without fear that a wrong guess will follow them into their next performance review.
FutureThink’s Spark Curiosity Challenge and its broader workshop programming are built for exactly this kind of repeated practice, giving teams a recurring structure to build the habit rather than a one-time session that fades once the calendar moves on.
None of this requires waiting for a naturally curious hire to walk through the door. The research is consistent on this point: curiosity responds to structure, and organizations that build that structure deliberately end up with more of it than organizations that simply hope for it.
Sources
- Harvard Business Review, “The Business Case for Curiosity”
- McKinsey & Company, “Creating an Innovation Culture Free from Fear”
- McKinsey & Company, “What Is Innovation?”
- McKinsey & Company, “The Committed Innovator: The Core Attributes of the Innovative Mindset”