Trusting Your Curious Mind
Change Happens. Leveraging Curiosity Can Help!
I recently read an article from Big Think that frames how you can adapt to change with curiosity. The more curious you are, the easier it is to adapt verses react to change.
I’ve considered myself a change agent for a long time. I’m constantly putting myself in situations where I’m trying or enabling positive change, even on a small scale. I wrote about it some time ago, talking about making small changes (pebbles) instead of trying to make sweeping large changes (mountains).
Sometimes it’s possible to move mountains if you have a whole organization of people with you working to move it. Mostly, I’ve found myself too often be the outlier around prioritizing change. It takes a lot of work to make even a small change in a medium to large company setting. You have to build relationships, trust, and ability to shift the mindset of a person, a manager, or even a team.
What I liked about the Big Think article is that I do have that curiosity factor. What happens when there’s too much change happening at once though? My curiosity gets overloaded, drowning out my executive functions or minimizing it to the point that I can only wade through drastic changes with brutal prioritization. I pull back from curiosity when I should probably double down on it. Not just hypothesize about actions, but move to take them. Even small actions can lead to big changes.
I’ve done this instinctively at times, like this blog, and public speaking. I can trace these small actions to much larger outcomes where I’ve been paid for writing and speaking about testing. I didn’t start there. It took time. But I had to experiment first. See what worked. Then keep making improvements.
Curiosity allows for that experimentation. Curiosity allows us to take the small step toward a bigger goal.
(I have to keep reminding myself this even as I’ve repeated this advice to others over the years.)
If you’re struggling with a bigger goal. Find the pebble in the details. What can you tackle first that would make the bigger goal a reality? What folks do you have around you that could help you think of smaller experiments you can try that let you take a step toward the bigger goal?
In the Big Think article, it has five ways to navigate change with curiosity. This mind set is brilliant and I realized after reading the article that I need to trust my curious mind MORE, not less, when things are shifting rapidly. I especially like #5 in the list they provided. Treat Failure as Information!
Doesn’t that sound familiar? It should, especially to those in software development and testing. If risk is mitigated as much as possible, then a failure should be treated as a data point. We should be curious about it. It can drive change, which can be scary, but if we take that driver and break it into tiny doses, we can more effectively use that driver for change.
The challenge here is to not let the data scare you. Which is a huge ask in this day and age, especially when companies have become more and more reactionary.
Even a small curiosity can lead to bigger things. Will they always be better things? Only you can decide that. The experiments will point the way.
If you’d like to Revolutionize your curiosity, I suggest taking a look at this workbook.
It’s helping me identify things I already have I can leverage and other things I want to learn more about. It engages my curiosity factor. Maybe it will engage yours too.