(Part two in a series of four)

Let’s start in the backstreets of Tokyo, with a story from Ethnographic Thinking.

My team and I were in the discovery phase of our project, exploring different models for retail experiences. More specifically, we were looking for new and innovative ways that retailers were combining products and services, and Tokyo fit the bill.

Our focus was on businesses that had similar offerings to our client: home care, nutrition, and beauty; so our field research included visits to many of Tokyo’s retail hubs and major department stores. In one, we bought a set of tea cups, and observed the intricate packaging practices and customer care rituals of Japanese retail. In another, some team members had skin tests performed at a beauty counter, and received personalized products that matched their skin type. We also visited tea shops, nutritional centers, and took a cooking class.

At the end of one particularly long day, having duly completed our research agenda, we wound our way back to the hotel through Tokyo's labyrinth of tiny alleys...and promptly got lost. In our haze, we spotted a shop that looked like it had something to do with shoes, although it didn't look like any cobbler we'd ever seen. In fact, it looked more like a small hotel lobby, with shoes prominently featured in the window. Although this clearly wasn’t on our research plan, we decided to venture in.

At the back of the shop, the shopkeeper was putting the final touches on a repair she’d recently completed. We spent some time talking with her about the business — how long she'd been there, what types of repairs she was making, etc. While we were chatting, a customer came in. 

A clerk appeared out of nowhere to serve the customer, and after some back and forth, pulled out a pair of shoes and showed them to the customer. Then he put them back into a cabinet behind the workspace. They chatted a bit more, and he pulled out another pair — discussed them at length with the customer, and then put those back too. As we stood and watched, we eventually asked the shopkeeper what was happening. 

After a bit of back and forth, we learned that this was not only a shoe repair shop, but also a shoe hotel, where customers with small apartments could store their shoes when not in use. None of us had ever heard of a shoe hotel before, so we continued to probe. It turned out that in addition to storage, the shop offered ongoing high quality care, and perhaps more importantly, insight and casual banter about the latest trends in footwear — a hub for all things shoe related.

The Universal Appeal of Curiosity

You might be thinking that I’m going to call for more curious and exploratory research. Yes, expanding our pool of perspectives and remaining open to unexpected connections in our work clearly has advantages. For one, continually applying a curious mindset increases the odds that new ideas will inspire our work. More importantly, curiosity drives an influx of ideas that eventually cross-pollinate and build on one another. This exposes our organizations to a wider range of perspectives, which stimulates creativity and reduces stifling groupthink — all valuable contributions.

But the point I want to make in this post goes beyond that. Across many projects over the years I’ve noticed that curiosity generates the most value when we create opportunities for our cross-functional partners to engage and embody their own curiosity as well. For example, our accidental visit to the Tokyo shoe hotel had such wide-ranging impact in part because the Vice President of Innovation was with us that day in the field, where his own curiosity was activated. In fact, after we got the conversation rolling with the shop owner, he was just as engaged in asking questions as the research team.

Facilitating the curiosity of others requires us to shift focus from thinking of ourselves as the only instrument for exploration to serving as hosts for activating the curiosity of others. Your cross-functional partners may be curious about different things than you, but they are curious. This is because the core drivers of human curiosity are deeply intertwined with our evolutionary history and neurological structures. The literature on this topic runs deep, but I think it’s worth highlighting a few insights here.

First, like all humans, our collaborators have an intrinsic motivation for novel information and exploration. This fundamental aspect of curiosity has significant evolutionary value. The drive to explore the environment, even without immediate rewards, allows us (and many other animals) to learn about resources, dangers, and opportunities, which enhance our adaptability and chances of survival in challenging environments. Neurologically, curiosity also triggers our dopaminergic system and prefrontal cortex as intrinsic rewards associated with novelty-seeking behaviors.

Our responses to surprise are particularly telling in this regard. From an evolutionary perspective, responding to unexpected events is crucial for learning about changes in the environment and avoiding potential threats. But neurologically, experiments suggest that there’s actually a neural link between surprise, memory, and the drive to learn more.

Enabling curiosity works because we’re inherently curious as a species.

If you can find ways to ignite, engage, and frame your collaborators’ inherent curiosity, they will often become more active contributors to strategic insights and — even better — advocates for those insights across the organization, since their own process of discovery will make those insights more memorable and useful to them.

So how exactly do we facilitate and enable curiosity within cross-functional teams? In the following sections, I’ll share three examples from projects in which we leveraged curiosity to accelerate strategic insight and cross-functional ownership. In each, I’ll emphasize a key principle of human curiosity — novelty, information gain, or embodiment — although they each included all three to varying degrees.

Immersive Experiences: Hosting Curious Embodiment

Let’s start with the last of these — embodiment. In my partnership with Ethnoworks co-founders Soo-Young Chin and Yoon Cho, we developed a series of immersive experiences that were an incredibly powerful means of helping healthcare stakeholders engage their curiosity by experiencing what it’s like to go through life as one of the patients they served. Rooted in ethnography and inspired by street theater, the projects began with ethnographic research into the daily experiences of patients (in one case, uninsured patients, in another, those managing complex health records). Our insights from this work helped us develop a set of personas, each of which served as a role for our stakeholders to assume through a series of scripted scenarios set in real-world locations.

Each scenario was designed to directly reflect the challenges of patients from our ethnographic research—and some were quite challenging! One stakeholder fielded calls from his ex-wife (played by one of our researchers) from a golf course as she fretted about managing their daughter’s diabetes diagnosis in light of his recent unemployment. In another, a stakeholder suffered long waits in multiple waiting rooms struggling to track down paperwork to cover breast cancer treatments. In still another, a stakeholder stood on a street corner looking for work alongside day laborers (spoiler alert: a real knife fight broke out!).

At key times throughout each immersion, stakeholders were presented with a set of in-the-moment choices to make in response to scenarios and prompts. For example, the stakeholder taking on the role of a day-laborer suddenly ‘suffered a fall’ from a ladder and had to choose between visiting a botanica, navigating care at a local clinic, exploring acupuncture, or ignoring his pain and continuing to send money back to his family in Mexico.

After a day spent at various locations, facing often difficult choices and tradeoffs, participants shared their experiences with a broader set of stakeholders across the healthcare industry the following day. This is where curiosity payed off even further. Those who hadn’t played roles in the immersion had the opportunity to question those who did, and, more importantly, to explore their choice logics. They also had the opportunity to view video clips taken directly from our ethnographic research. Breakout groups then served as the venue for stakeholders to brainstorm solutions tailored to (and across) each of the roles and scenarios. In one immersion this brainstorm generated eight new ideas to meet the needs of patients; in another, ten. Results from one included the launch of a healthcare access phone system, and in both cases, solidified new private / non-profit partnerships to meet the needs of patients.

Live Model Tests: Getting Curious about Information Gain

The second example I’d like to share focuses on ‘live model tests’ – experiments designed to try out a new offering in real-world conditions. I led research for two of these tests, one in Moscow and the other in Toulouse. Both were pop-up experience centers our team built that combined retail sales and sustainable living activities (e.g., cooking classes, yoga, candle making, etc.). The idea was to learn as much as possible in a pre-defined time frame under real-world conditions in markets that had been traditionally challenging for the company.

These tests were a fantastic opportunity to gather data about real-world responses to our experimental offerings. We tracked everything from types of products sold, foot traffic, attendance at events, sales agent productivity, and even time and motion studies of customer movements within the stores. So. Much. Data.

In fact, the challenge was often to determine what not to track since there were so many opportunities to gather data and derive insights. We spent many long nights after the shops closed, reviewing not only the data we’d gathered, but what we might gather, and what to eliminate. Ultimately, it was our team’s curiosity that helped us all determine the types of information that would be most valuable. Sales results were, of course, critical; but what factors influenced them? What inter-dependencies across various measures were contributing to our understanding of successes and failures for our test?

Genuine curiosity helped get us past data overload, and focus on what was most informative and compelling. Overall, the pop-ups served as a vehicles for curiosity, so that we could engage and understand the value of serendipity, unexpected interactions, unanticipated causal chains, and unforeseen interdependencies that drove sales.

Signal Scanning: Leveraging the Power of Novelty

Much of the work I’ve led over the years has involved pathfinding — a practice that identifies emerging needs and works backwards to develop products that fit, or can adapt toward, those needs. From my days at Intel’s Digital Home Group, where we were tasked with understanding the emerging role of technology in Egypt, Brazil, South Korea, Germany, to more recent focus on generative AI, I’ve deployed a mix of foresight, foundational, exploratory, and secondary research to ensure organizations are investing in products that meet both evolving and enduring customer needs.

Early stages of pathfinding often involve a practice known as signal scanning (or horizon scanning) — where researchers explore the margins of a given topic to identify signals of change that demonstrate strong momentum or early signs of growth. The goal is to identify patterns across those signals, and determine if there are strong enough themes that point toward marketplace shifts. A clear understanding of those shifts can help organizations determine whether it makes sense for them to invest in developing products aimed at serving emerging customer needs.

While this process includes careful analysis and interpretation of signals, patterns, themes, and shifts, I’ve found that signal scanning itself often offers one the greatest opportunities to engage a team’s curiosity. In fact, more recently I’ve found that gathering and sharing signals of change are in many ways one of the most compelling, participatory, and valuable stages of the pathfinding process. Cross-functional partners with deep expertise in their field are always thirsty for what’s new in their industry. They enjoy the challenge of considering how they might respond to those signals and leverage change in the marketplace. They also enjoy sharing signals of change they find themselves — a way for them to take on the role of curious explorers.

Their curiosity about those signals, the different scenarios they may portend, and how the organization might respond, is often more engaging for them than passively receiving reports focused on researchers’ interpretations alone. In short, the novelty of signal discovery, exploration, meaning-making, and debate for our cross-functional partners is often one of the most valuable assets of this work. We just need to provide the platform for them to engage their naturally-occurring curiosity, offer frameworks for interpretation, and get out of the way!

AI is Not Curious

Returning to the question of the enduring value of our practice for this series of posts; curiosity works as a form of engagement and organizational growth precisely because it’s uniquely human. It’s directly tied to evolutionary benefits like adaptation and survival, as well as neurological reward for learning and remembering. What’s more, across our fellow insights practitioners, among our stakeholders, and throughout the populations and participants who partner with us, curiosity is not only a trait we share, but a bonding force that emerges when we recognize it in each other. A curious colleague or participant is signaling openness, engagement, generosity, and sometimes even empathy. In short, we enjoy learning together.

AI models may simulate curiosity by asking questions based on patterns they identify, but ultimately these are prompts that lack the demonstration of commitment and camaraderie that curiosity builds between humans. This contrast is especially evident when you consider how AI tools ask questions of their users. If you’ve ever engaged with a conversational AI, it’s plain to see that they’re mapping patterns of question-making to the contexts of the inputs they receive. In short, they function in ways that might be best characterized as inquisitive, not genuinely curious.

Similar to the way we initially held fast to our research plan in Tokyo, AI models never stray from the constraints of the context they’re given — and likely never will, since that’s how they’re designed. In fact, LLM’s, and their prioritization of pattern recognition and reproduction, operate within the realm of the known, even when they are tasked with identifying outliers.

Curious humans, however, pick up on odd signs, stray interruptions, absurdities, serendipitous encounters, and other stimuli that trigger new lines of inquiry and increased engagement with each other. We will ask the stupid questions; and the responses have the potential to generate unexpected resonances and collisions with other humans. We will wander and explore without direction; and the result will create alliances and trigger conflicts with other humans. Thank God.

So, if we simply want to entertain additional lines of inquiry about a topic, these models can ask productive questions. They can even stimulate, propel, and enrich our innate curiosity. (In fact, the opportunity to surprise and delight here is incredibly promising for education applications.) But, if you’re designing for truly novel, embodied, human-centered offerings, human curiosity (not AI inquisitiveness) rules.

More to explore:

• The psychology and neuroscience of curiosity
• Merits of curiosity: a simulation study
• A transdisciplinary view on curiosity beyond linguistic humans: animals, infants, and artificial intelligence