Embracing curiosity
How often have you come across someone who "knows" what is best for others? Hoping you will forgive my provocation, dear reader, how often and with what degree of certainty do you know what is best for others? Yet another question: how irritating or unreasonable is it to realise that others think they know what is best for you? If it seems to you that these questions lead to answers that seem contradictory, it is not a mistake. It seems to happen a lot: knowing what is best for others and disliking it when others tell us they know what is best for us.
Not being in any way exclusive to the corporate world, we find many examples of this phenomenon. And, typically, at least in my experience and that of some (quite a few!) colleagues, we find these people living in human resources departments and/or in positions that imply leading other people. Among the countless examples I could share, I choose one because it is almost caricatural. A few years ago we were preparing a programme about unconscious biases, with the purpose of increasing awareness and the capacity to mitigate them in the performance assessment process, and we noticed that the team from the client-company that was preparing the programme with us was willing to give the answers, as if in a script. It was curious to realise that, at the same time, they wanted the recipients to be interested in the programme.
How many times have we heard that "it won't work for our people"; that "we can't have engineers listening to music or looking at a painting"; that "it's better to have the answer prepared, because people are very quiet here" and a moment of silence will not happen! It may be that people really reflect and take the risk to learn, to discover something new during those seconds or minutes...
There is a particular dynamic in human relationships where this asymmetry seems to have legitimacy to exist, at least from the point of view of social acceptance: the relationship between parents and children. In simpler terms, it is commonly accepted that fathers and mothers "know" what is best for their children. Moreover, it is not strange that parents are required to know what is best for their children, on pain of being judged insufficient in that role. Especially when it comes to babies. Fortunately, there are theories that challenge this idea.
Donald Winnicott, a famous English paediatrician and psychoanalyst who worked in the 20th century, coined the expression "good enough mother". In a basic and summarised way, with this idea, Winnicott advocates that mothers and fathers (as "caring figures") who always have an immediate and correct response to the needs of their children are not the best, as far as the development of children is concerned. The best parents are the ones who get it right many times and also make mistakes, both natural and desirable; they are the ones who do not run to solve the situation, thus allowing the child to get in touch with the external reality, necessarily different from the internal one. In other words, it is this mechanism that enables us to progressively understand that we are not always right and that we do not dominate the world.
Continuing the search for inspiration in psychoanalytic thought, we travel to more recent times where we find the, also psychoanalyst and also English, Philip Stokoe. In his book The Curiosity Drive builds on the Freudian ideas that defend the existence of two basic drives - life and death drives - which Bion called love and hate, by introducing the hypothesis of the existence of a third drive: curiosity. According to the author, curiosity has a fundamental role in the "formation" of our mind. The search for knowledge and, more than that, I would add, the need to give meaning to what it does not yet have, will be one of the main engines of our development (1) and, consequently, of our evolution as humans.
Let us try to link the ideas of these two psychoanalysts: good enough parents are those who allow time and space for children to discover the pleasure of discovery; the kind of pleasure that is annihilated by the certainty of certain answers. They will be the parents who can live well and, through their example, pass on to their children the experience of living with and sustaining curiosity. That curiosity that aunts and grandmothers tend to kill with a merciless blow: "this crying is hunger; or it's the teeth; or it's the wet nappy; or... Surely! That's got to be it!" Living with and sustaining curiosity, both our own and that of others, involves not giving in to (pre)occupation with effectiveness and efficiency. The idea is to allow delight in the pleasure and beauty of discovery, which involve confronting the eventual displeasure and frustration, at least those that may arise in the immediate. It is not a question, therefore, of getting it right but of enduring being wrong in order to discover and build something truly new.
Therefore, to think that one knows what is best for others is ultimately a murder of one's own curiosity. And the saddest thing is that it is also suicide, because to presume to know others better than oneself, one would have to kill oneself.
Companies, teams and human resources departments are not nurseries. Even children don't deserve to be guessed at and always get right what they need. People deserve us to join them in discovering not only the answers but also new questions.
Written for Link to Leaders on 1 April 2021; published 14 April 2021.
So much so that it may even turn against us. When we don't find meaning we have the extraordinary capacity to quickly invent one, with all the risks that such an invention can entail.
