By the Lionesses of Africa Operations Dept

**“No one can label you a failure when what you are trying to do is audacious. Botching something easy is a failure. Failing in an attempt to achieve something huge is just courageous.”**

…as stated by the fabulous Anne Boden, who against all the odds founded Starling Bank in the UK. Read Melanie’s review of her book here and indeed we too wrote around her book in our Blog entitled ‘Dreaming with Ambition’ here, (so clearly we are fans!). But that one message above from her book ‘Banking On It: How I Disrupted an Industry’, is interesting because great leaders do not worry so much about being labelled (Elon Musk, for example, would stay under the duvet if labels concerned him!). What is noticeable is that they encourage their employees, their teams to reach for the sky, to go for the huge, not because they are relaxed about risk, (in fact they respect risk, never fear it), but exactly because this encourages far greater results for their employees and for their businesses.

But what can we, mere mortals, do to come close to what these inspirational leaders have done and are doing? How can we encourage reaching for the stars in ourselves and in our employees? Is a fear of flying too close to the sun like a later day Icarus, forcing us to stay too close to the ground, becoming dull, mundane and negative? In that state, do we drag others down with us? If so, how can we pick ourselves, our employees and our businesses up? The answer lies in the simple word, curiosity. Incredible things happen when you are curious or you encourage, curiosity.

We listened recently to a podcast by Heidrick & Struggles’ Adam Howe (here) as part of their world class Knowledge Centre, as he spoke with Simon Brown, of Switzerland-based Novartis, one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies. To give you an idea of their size, when Covid hit, overnight they had to handle 60,000 employees being sent home to work remotely. That must have been some wild weekend for the senior management and IT teams! What sparked our interest was that Simon is the author of a book entitled ‘The Curious Advantage’ and he drove Novartis’ company-wide cultural transformation to become as he says “curious, inspired, and unbossed”.

So what is this all about? Simon spoke of the seven steps or as he likes to call it, Sailing the Seven Seas (you will see why soon). He quoted Justin Trudeau who said that the pace of change has never been this fast but it will never be this slow again. If you take a moment to think about that, this is actually both very clever, but also incredibly very true. The pace of change was already very fast (think back to how slow it was during our grandparents’ or even our parents’ days), but when Covid struck, we suddenly realized just how slow we had all had been. The shock of Covid made us recognize that we were able to adapt, be nimble and create far faster than we had ever previously imagined possible. There is no way we shall ever go back to how it was, as far as speed and delivery is concerned.

Simon is convinced (and we would agree) that curiosity is not only something that should be encouraged, but actually welcomed within any organisation. As he says: “…if we're curious, we're asking questions, we're looking to find different ways of doing things, we're experimenting, we're testing things out.”

As all of us who have raised children know, the best one can do for them is to create a safe space from which they can be curious, to learn and grow. For a business, it is no different. Simon talks of Leaders creating ‘psychological safety’ for the employees - no one likes being made to look like a fool, so this safety net where nothing is too daft to discuss, is essential. To tell a child that you don’t care about their ideas, ‘just do as you’re told’, stifles their imagination, telling an employee this, kills trust, innovation and more.

As humans we are naturally curious - just look at the explosion in interest around Ted Talks. A quick 15 minute talk on a subject - who would have guessed that this would have become such a huge success, yet our curiosity has driven it. Simon’s point is that given this is a natural trait, not something that has to be trained or forced into your employees, you just have to find a way to release this urge within your employees and then reap the rewards!

So what are Simon’s Seven Seas and why a journey?

They are:

Context; Community; Curation; Creativity; Construction; Criticality and finally Confidence and there is a clear journey as you progress through these, until you return to the start…

Context: Where are you as a business and what is it that you want to be curious about.?It’s hardly going to help your business if your team spends hours investigating pressed flowers if you are in the mechanical engineering sector… Let’s keep it real!

Community: Who will you or your team learn from? Can you as a business leader bring in experts to give a Ted Talk or discussion session? Where can you find global leaders and have they published articles that can be easily found and read, are you able to invite them via zoom to talk to your team? Bill Gates or Richard Branson may be a bit busy (!), but there are other thought leaders out there other than the obvious ones. Think laterally and out of the box.

Curation: The internet is a source of great knowledge, wisdom and inspiration, but also a huge amount of rubbish (and we’re not just talking about ‘fake news’ here!). Filter out the noise so that you or your team can concentrate. A curator of a Library or Museum does exactly that. A ton of ‘stuff’ arrives on the doorstep, within there will be a few nuggets. Find them.

Creativity: Not all of this information written or designed by outsiders is produced with your business or team in mind - funny that! This is where you and your team have to use the little grey cells - how can this information be adapted to our business, to our hairy audacious goal, to our and our customers’ lives? This is where the 18th century word ‘ideation’ comes into play - technically the formation of mental ideas, but in reality sitting, discussing and trashing out the ideas into a moulded proposal for a way forward.

Construction: There is far too much talk and very little action in the world for our liking. This is where you encourage your team to actually get on with it and turn the talk, ideas and plans into action. You need to construct a test, collect the results and then…

Criticality: Be critical in your testing of the results. Recognize the desire for the solution to be perfect, but also recognize that nothing is perfect first time. So be critical, dig deep into the results and experiment with other routes to create alternative outcomes. Be careful of confirmation bias - you want the end result to be correct, but deep down we all want it to confirm to our initial belief, here we can all fall into the trap of only looking at results from an angle that will confirm what we already thought, so seriously encourage curiosity at this stage - nothing is wrong, there is no failure, only an outcome that was not expected. As Elon Musk’s SpaceX launch commentator John Insprucker said when their self landing rocket yet again exploded on landing:

“We’ve just got to work on that landing a little bit…” as seen here from the Guardian Newspaper (catch John at 1.13 onwards):

Finally Confidence: Confidence finally arrives when you have tested, critically discussed and pulled apart all results.

Now with such a win under your team’s belt, they can take this confidence and increase their curiosity. As Simon says: “with that confidence you can be bolder to be more curious, ask bigger questions, and do bigger experiments.” At this stage Simon points out that your employees will be unbossed, they are doing what they love, their curiosity is being fed by themselves and their growth and the innovation within your company will simply increase.

As the world famous business school, Instead ask: “Is your enterprise dominated by passive thinking and prescribed routines? Or is it one that generates fresh thinking and unlocks insights into the future?…Central to the practice of thought leadership is curiosity…”

Occasionally the world sends us someone so curious, so full of lateral thoughts, so not afraid to think outside the box, so willing to fail if it means learning, and as we see at the end of this clip from National Geographic, so able to achieve something huge. Now that’s courageous.

Just look at the reactions of his employees… here without doubt is someone who has fed and encouraged their curiosity…