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🍌 Bananas are radioactive.
🦅 Vultures have stomach acid strong enough to dissolve lead paint.
🍝 Black holes can stretch you into spaghetti.
None of this is information you need on an ordinary work day. But it is a reminder that the world is full of things we don’t yet know, that being curious opens doors to discoveries we didn’t know we were looking for.
Curiosity isn’t just a trait children have in abundance and adults misplace somewhere along the way. It’s also one of the most underrated strategic advantages in modern organisations. The most resilient teams and most innovative companies treat curiosity not as a distraction but as a core business capability.
At the heart of every “overnight” transformation is months or years of someone paying attention, noticing a pattern, asking uncomfortable questions, and testing their way forward. Across industries, the pattern is remarkably consistent: organisations that treat curiosity as a working muscle - something to be exercised, stretched, and strengthened - are the ones that grow, adapt, and endure.
Meanwhile, the organisations that stall are usually the ones that pride themselves on knowing rather than learning. They mistake experience for certainty, favour familiar ideas, and unconsciously punish those who ask “why?” more often than is convenient. Over time, the organisation accumulates blind spots: customer needs it can’t see, market shifts it can’t interpret, internal risks it can’t quite name until they’re already doing damage.
When people talk about innovation, they often jump straight to ideas, products, or technology. But innovation happens at the end of a process, not in isolation. Before you can reap the rewards of innovation, curiosity needs to have done the heavy lifting.
Your team’s ability to ask better questions, to look for them in different places, to be uncomfortable with them, directly influences key aspects of your business, across customers, operations, and strategy.
Here are three key areas where curiosity can help to unlock innovation.
Curiosity digs beneath surface-level requests to uncover what people really need.
Low-curiosity teams take requirements at face value.
High-curiosity teams uncover motivations, hidden constraints, unstated opportunities, and problems customers didn’t know how to describe.
Great products are rarely built from the first question asked. Often they rise and fall based on continuing to ask questions. Take LEGO for example.
In the early 2000s, LEGO was in real trouble. Sales were sinking, and inside the company the assumption was that kids wanted bigger sets, with more pieces … and more instructions. Thankfully, instead of guessing, LEGO got curious. Researchers sat on living-room floors, watched how kids actually played, and listened to grumbles from parents and long-time fans. What they saw was delightfully chaotic: kids dumped the pieces out, ignored the booklets, and built whatever popped into their heads.
In 2015, then-CEO, Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, would elucidate this observation, saying,
“We needed to get back to the core idea - letting children build their own worlds.”
That spark of curiosity changed everything. LEGO shifted toward open-ended kits, builder challenges, fan-designed sets, and a return to classic bricks that encouraged creativity over perfection. The more they embraced what kids really wanted, the faster LEGO bounced back. Curiosity didn’t just tweak the product, it rescued a company by reconnecting it to its users through one of its core elements: imagination.
In environments where change is constant, curiosity acts like an internal compass.
Curious teams treat ambiguity as data rather than danger, scanning widely for signals and adjusting quickly because they’re not attached to a single story about “the way things are done.”
They stay open, flexible, and alert to what’s shifting around them. So when markets move or customer preferences evolve, curious organisations are the ones that flex, adapt, and often find new opportunities hiding in the noise. For Spotify, the noise was philosophical and literal.
It’s a staple of Spotify’s platform now, but their Discover Weekly playlist is a relatively new introduction. Its implementation began in the early 2010s, not with a big product vision, but with engineers getting curious about the “noise” in user behaviour - things like skipping songs. They analysed thousands of human-made playlists and noticed subtle patterns in how people skipped, replayed, and grouped songs. Turns out, these clues revealed listeners’ real tastes better than likes or saves and treating these tiny signals as valuable data, not statistical clutter, led to the idea of a personalised playlist that could predict what users would enjoy before they knew it themselves.
During early testing, a bug accidentally inserted songs people already knew into what was meant to be an all-new-music playlist. Instead of fixing it automatically, the team dug into the data and found something surprising: listeners enjoyed having one or two familiar tracks anchoring the mix. That insight became part of Discover Weekly’s design.
Curiosity led engineers to adapt, multiple times in the face of noise and feedback, and create a feature which now defines Spotify’s service.
Good decisions don’t come from certainty … they come from curiosity.
When teams stay curious, they naturally test their own assumptions instead of treating them as facts. They look at problems from different angles, search for evidence that might change their minds, and avoid the trap of locking onto the first thing that looks or sounds or feels right. That leads to better decisions.
Curiosity doesn’t mean asking more questions, it means asking better ones. The kind that cut through noise, reveal what’s really going on, and help people make choices with clearer thinking and fewer blind spots. For Intel, there was one key question which completely shifted their business, its focus, and its viability.
Intel’s defining strategic shift didn’t come from piles of data or endless debate. It came from a single curious question.
As Andy Grove recounted in Only the Paranoid Survive, Intel’s leaders were stuck assuming they had to save their struggling memory-chip business. Meetings circled the same ideas because everyone treated “Intel makes memory” as a fixed truth, the thing that sounded right. In the middle of this, Grove turned to co-founder Gordon Moore and asked a different kind of question,
“If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what would he* do?”
Moore’s answer was immediate,
“He’d get us out of memory.”
Instead of dismissing an uncomfortable idea, Grove leaned into it, making the shift before being kicked out and watching someone else make it. That one reframing cut through years of assumptions and opened the door to a clearer decision: exit memory and focus on microprocessors.
It was a bold pivot that reshaped Intel’s future. Not because the company worked harder at the problem, but because its leaders asked a better question, the kind that reveals what’s really going on and leads to smarter choices.
Thriving organisations don’t get there by accident; they get there because curiosity keeps them close to what’s real. LEGO rediscovered its users not through strategy decks* but by sitting on living-room floors, watching what children actually did, not what the company assumed they did. Spotify found opportunity in the “noise” of user behaviour, treating skipped songs as valuable data rather than irrelevant clutter, and adapting their product again and again as new signals emerged. Intel reshaped its entire future by challenging a foundational assumption and asking a single, disarming question: What would a new leader do if they started tomorrow?
Across all three, the pattern is unmistakable: curiosity that digs deeper, listens harder, and refuses to let the first answer be the final one. It is this discipline of questioning, noticing, and reframing that separates organisations that grow from those that quietly stall.
*Oof, Andy, oof. What would they do.
**Ok, let’s be real - they probably still had strategy decks
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