Is curiosity a leadership superpower?

A version of this article was published in Arts Professional on 6th March 2024.

Power and confusion

Curiosity is sometimes described as a ‘leadership superpower’, but unfocused curiosity can also be frustrating, confusing and ineffective for the people you work with.

Being able to distil and transform new ideas into actionable, testable solutions that help identify effective ways forward for your colleagues, your teams and your organisation is where the true superpower lies.

When considering change it’s easy to let yourself become paralysed, feeling that you have to get things perfect. Or that you have to accomplish everything in one ‘big bang’ programme.

But Nick Sherrard (a partner at venture firm, Label Ventures, and who has also held a variety of digital-focused roles in the cultural sector) says, “a curious leader with a willingness to learn by doing will outperform someone who just talks about their ideas”.

Experiment and iterate

Through our work at Substrakt, and conversations with leaders across the cultural sector, we’ve observed that the most impactful people take an effective, iterative ‘test and learn’ approach. 

They identify small opportunities for experimentation and then double down on success to extend those wins more widely.

But it often seems that there’s an entrenched feeling in the sector that there is simply no time for anyone to create these opportunities for experimentation. 

We hear that people feel they can’t justify spending time (let alone money) on such speculative and ‘risky’ activities.

As Kati Price, Head of Experience & Digital at the V&A says “test and learn – it’s a phrase you hear a lot of in our sector. But while there is a lot of chat, how many of us are actually doing it?"

But done in the right way, and with an understanding of the difference it can make to your longer-term strategy, it’s clear that it’s well worth the investment. And more than that, the time commitment isn’t disruptive if approached in this iterative way.

By coupling active curiosity with an ability to rapidly work out where the most effective solutions might lie, you can help their colleagues and teams get unstuck and collectively begin to imagine new, more successful futures.

And by approaching and framing this work as iterative and experimental you are derisking it and making it easier for colleagues to engage with.

In an article published in 2023, Anthony Giagnacovo explored the effectiveness of this iterative, small-scale approach to experimentation:

“The critical aspect here is to keep these experiments compact, specific, and time-bound. Studies indicate that such focused experiments foster a 15% increase in team curiosity and a broader range of perspectives, even amidst chaos.”

Kati Price agrees, “start by asking, what’s the impact you want to have? In which case, what do you need to learn, and what are the tests you could run that will help you find the answers? It’s good to frame this as a hypothesis – by doing X we believe we will achieve Y. Ideally this hypothesis is based on some evidence and insight.”

Culture is key

Of course the ability to shift successfully to a more experimental, curious mode of working will be dictated almost entirely by your institutional culture.

Booking.com is frequently cited as an organisation with an especially ‘innovation-friendly’ culture. One of their core tenets is “anyone at the company can test anything—without management’s permission”. 

Could the same be said about most cultural organisations? Sadly, it’s unlikely.

I’m not suggesting that any cultural organisation would ever reach the level of experimentation that somewhere like Booking.com undertakes (it is estimated that at any one time, Booking.com has “quadrillions (millions of billions) of landing-page permutations”).

It’s not feasible from a financial, technology, or time perspective.

But a shift from the usual approach that many organisations take seems increasingly urgent and necessary.

Nick Sherrard talks about how embracing a more open, curious approach to leadership can have a big impact. 

“My board asks me how we can enable our team to do the best work of their lives. That leads you towards helping people experiment, and follow hunches, and still be disciplined. I think these small changes in thinking can lead to quite big improvements in the outputs of a team”.

Getting it wrong and dealing with doubt

Much of the reasoning behind not experimenting often comes from the fear of getting it wrong.

This is why the ‘start small’ approach mentioned above is so important. 

An effective experiment will be testing something that is potentially significant if proved correct or successful, and not disastrous if it fails.

As with much of this type of work, culture also plays an important role. Rather than looking to achieve consensus around an idea it may be effective to consider different ways of collaboration and making decisions.

In recent conversations with Dr Carrie Goucher (an expert on organisational culture), she cited using tools such as ‘agreement levels’ “you might have five levels. For example, level one could be total veto. I disagree and I won't support it. Level two could be I don't agree, but I will back it. Three could be I think we need more information. Four could be I agree, but with these caveats. And five could be I wholeheartedly agree, and it allows people to take a position and make that clear very quickly.”

Consent decision-making is another potentially effective approach. In this model of decision-making, rather than trying to get everyone to agree it means progress only stops if there is a strong enough objection. It can be a powerful way of making progress whilst retaining safeguards.

Examples of experimentation in practice

Curiosity and experimentation may seem idealistic. But it is increasingly the case that the established ways of working across areas as diverse as marketing, fundraising, audience development, programming, artistic development, audience experience, and more, are no longer working as well as they once did for the cultural sector. 

Over recent years we have seen some effective examples of experimentation across all of these areas, which may act as a guide for organisations looking to shift their approach.

Here are just a couple of examples.

In 2019 Opera North tested a new approach to engaging first timers, experimenting with email automation, specific content, and a physical welcome pack. This approach saw almost a third of those who signed up converting into first time attendees. This scheme is now an important part of the way Opera North welcome’s new audiences.

In 2020, through the first pandemic, the National Theatre tested putting out full-length films on YouTube for the first time. This experiment allowed them to iterate quickly and ultimately led to the launch of their NT At Home video-on-demand programme. When we spoke about this project on the Digital Works Podcast, Nicholas Triantafyllou said about that time “it definitely felt like a startup because we were reinventing everything [...] we felt we needed to offer something to the public. And also it was a test to see how the screenings would work”.

Your experiments will look different depending on what you are testing. Kati Price observes, “testing can take many forms. It could be running some content experiments to see what new formats might increase engagement with your social media followers. Or using software to A/B test new features that might lead to increased conversions. Test and learn looks different depending on what you’re setting out to achieve.”

Different ways forward

I was looking at the career of Tony Ageh MBE (mostly recently Tony was Chief Digital Officer at the New York Public Library; he has also held leadership roles at the BBC, Virgin, and the Guardian). 

He described his focus at the Guardian in the following way: “I was given a brief to “…think of something that might help that we’re not doing already”. I set myself these objectives: to address the decline in sales and readership, build confidence inside the organisation and outside, reduce production costs or increase profitability from magazines and supplements, and bring a sense of excitement to an organisation that had become risk-averse”.

All of those concerns from the early 1990s resonate with challenges our sector is facing today.

But it seems that the sector is becoming so worn out battling to sustain pre-existing models and ways of working that there is little or no space to consider ‘something that might help, that we’re not doing already’.

We need the curiosity and courage to imagine different possibilities, and experimentation will help us to work out which of those futures are worth pursuing. 

The sector is fortunate enough to be blessed with passionate, curious people in every organisation, in every department. Let's empower them and work together to find ways forward.

I’ll end with these final thoughts from Kati, “a test and learn culture requires curious minds, and, to be successful, requires genuinely embedding within an organisational culture. The main thing to realise is that an effective test and learn approach is a cyclical thing that involves using what you’ve learnt to inform what you do next. It’s ongoing.”

Nick Sherrard and Kati Price will both be speaking at the Digital Works Conference which takes place on 24th-25th April at Leeds City Museum. Find out more about the conference here https://thedigital.works/#schedule