Unlocking Curiosity at Work with Dr. Diane Hamilton

Why curiosity peaks at five and then collapses

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00:31Bill Gallagher: All right. Everybody knows innovation's cool. You want to innovate. You want to be innovative. You admire, you're jealous of innovative companies. How do you get to innovation? Curiosity plays a big part in that. It's the subject of our show today: tapping into curiosity for the point of innovation, make your business a better place.

00:51Bill Gallagher: Hey, everybody. Bill Gallagher, Scaling Coach and host of our super fine Scaling Up Business podcast. We come to you every week with an author and expert, guru, CEO, somebody to do or story something to do with growing, scaling your company a little bit better, a little bit faster, a little bit easier, taking less of the work out of it, making it more of a joy. 630 plus episodes at scalingcoach.com, scalingcoach.com, or wherever you're getting this right now. You know, LinkedIn, Spotify, Twitter—it's X—all the podcast platforms, YouTube, that kind of thing. We're everywhere. Like, subscribe, you know the deal. Turn on notifications so you get it. Or if you go to scalingcoach.com, you can also sign up for one of our monthly workshops. We do a workshop every month on getting started in the whole process of Scaling Up. So all that and more, scalingcoach.com.

01:41Bill Gallagher: Oh, yeah. So I'm joined now, if you're watching on screen, you can already see her here, by the author of Curiosity Unleashed, Diane Hamilton. Dr. Diane Hamilton is founder and CEO of Tonerra. Did I say that right?

01:54Dr. Diane Hamilton: Yes, you did.

01:54Bill Gallagher: Tonerra. And she's the inventor of the Curiosity Code Index, and she wrote this book, Curiosity Unleashed. And she's been around our world for a little bit and was recommended to us. So we thought we'd have her on. Welcome to the show, Dr. Diane Hamilton.

02:15Dr. Diane Hamilton: Well, thank you. I'm really excited to be here. It sounds like we know a lot of the same people, so I was very interested to be here to see the kinds of questions you ask. I want to see how curious you are. I know enough about you to know that some of your background is touching on some of the things that I work with in terms of consulting and getting people to be more relevant, which I think is really the big point behind curiosity. This can be fun to talk about that today.

02:50Bill Gallagher: Living in the world of curiosity and cultivating that, what's the last thing that made you curious?

02:58Dr. Diane Hamilton: Oh, everything makes me. My grandson yesterday, for Mother's Day, made me very curious because it's just so interesting to look at curiosity from the eyes of a child. It was really interesting when I wrote my first book, I looked at children because they get very curious and it peaks around the age of five, but then it tanks dramatically. And it's very similar to what we see with creativity, which we need these things if we want companies to be innovative, as you mentioned. This is so relevant in what we're trying to deal with. So yesterday it was very fun to watch my grandson of how he looked at the world and how he thinks about things.

03:41Dr. Diane Hamilton: When I give talks, I give keynotes often and I show a picture of two little girls at the San Francisco Museum of Fine Art back in the '60s. It was like on the back of Time magazine. It was this really cool picture. And there's artwork everywhere around them, but instead of looking at the artwork, they're looking through the air vent on the wall below the artwork because that's what you do when you're a kid, right? You want to know what's behind the vent. You don't care about the artwork, maybe. And we have this natural sense of curiosity that changes over time. That's what I found particularly fascinating because there's this state and trait curiosity. And if that state of like, oh, that's kind of interesting, but then you don't explore it further. But the trait form of curiosity is what I work with. I want to have people develop that and continue it as they grow older.

04:35Dr. Diane Hamilton: Long answer to what I find curious, but my grandson was so cute watching him explore the world yesterday at 1.5. It was adorable. He's 1.5.

04:45Bill Gallagher: So I have a two-year-old. That's awesome. Her favorite question is, why? Why? Why? Can't do that right now. Why? Well, it's really late. It's too late. Why? Well, because the day has progressed. Why? Because the sun is going down. Why? Well, it happens every… Why?

How assumptions and routines kill innovation

05:07Dr. Diane Hamilton: I don't think they'll give up. They'll keep going forever. I was on a ski boat, a ski bus, one time and there was a little girl, a Hispanic little girl, she said 'por qué' about a thousand times. So I think it's just every culture, it's just how it is.

05:23Bill Gallagher: It's adorable. It's interesting you say that it starts early on and then it peaks or plateaus, it flattens out for most of us around five. And it's remarkable that we might get to a place at five where we think we've got the world figured out. I feel like every time I think that I've got it figured out, that life has a way of smacking me in the head and going, yeah, dude.

05:46Dr. Diane Hamilton: Oh no, you won't. Well, it's interesting because you think about school. That's about the age you start getting into these things. And in Sir Ken Robinson's TED Talk, he talked about creativity and how you educate people out of their competencies. When we get into school, we start saying, this is how it should be. And so it didn't surprise me to see five was about the time. Also George Land's TED Talk, I don't know if you've seen that one, but it's also about creativity and it mimics what we see with curiosity. He followed kids from the time they were two to 31 and it just peaks and tanks right after that. And by the time you're 31, there are hardly any creative geniuses, but at age two, most of them were. So it's fascinating to me.

06:35Bill Gallagher: So before we get into all that and the stories that we have queued up, I'm fascinated by this idea and I'm struck by, we're talking about creativity and curiosity. I feel like I have a weakness around curiosity and a strength around creativity. Maybe you can help me dissect that. And I think this is probably true of a lot of our listeners and viewers, right? There's a lot of idea monkeys in our audience. And I like, I could, I generate ideas on waking in the shower. If I'm working out, as I drive, like I generate ideas. And with age, I've learned that most of those ideas are not that useful, valuable, or helpful, like that they're common. And yet I also know that my ideas are, like having a lot of ideas is not normal. Not everybody breathes ideas all the time. And for me, the ideas are, they're largely centered around things I know. So they're just connections between things that doesn't occur to other people. Like I see two things as being connected some way. Oh, there's an idea. But it's not relevant to my problem. With age, I've learned to let them go, mostly. And so I'm curious, is that not creative and how is that not connected? I don't know. What are your thoughts on any of that?

08:02Dr. Diane Hamilton: Okay. Well, you got a little Jerry Seinfeld quality too. You're noticing things. And the thing is, any comedian will tell you, you got to write down your notes, right? You got things you've noticed. You will get into a good talk later. You know that as a speaker, right? So a lot of it, I meet a lot of that. I mean, I've taught thousands of business courses and a lot of my students like to plan the plan, to plan the plan, and they never do anything but plan, right? So if we have these great ideas and don't do anything with them…

08:36Dr. Diane Hamilton: Very typical. But I look at curiosity as the spark to what you want to do in the workplace. To improve engagement, to improve innovation, productivity, motivation, you name it. So I think how I explain it when I talk to people is think about baking a cake. You're going to bake a cake and you have ingredients. You have flour and eggs and water, whatever you're going to mix together. Those are your ingredients. You mix it together and you put it in a pan and you put it in the oven and you want cake. But if you don't turn on the oven, you get something not cake. So that's the same thing in the workplace. We have ingredients that we want to fix these things. We have engagement, innovation, creativity, motivation, all these things. You mix it together and you put it in the pan and you go put it in the oven. And if you don't turn on the oven, you don't get your cake. And so we need to turn on the oven. And turning on the oven part is curiosity. That's the spark that lights the creativity.

09:36Dr. Diane Hamilton: I've had a lot of creativity experts on my show. I mean, whether, and just in general, experts from Daniel Goleman to Harvard professors and people who deal with any kind of behavioral thing. And they all say curiosity came first. So if you're having a problem with getting it to the next level, some of it is writing it down, some of it's not finding the thing that really makes you passionate. You just have to recognize those things and we'll get into them later, the things that hold you back. But I think a lot of people don't recognize curiosity at work. We've seen the research show that leaders think that they're encouraging it. But if you look at the, ask people who work for them, they don't agree. So there's a disconnect. And that's what I do. I work with companies to help them build a culture of curiosity by learning these things that keep people back from being curious.

10:34Dr. Diane Hamilton: And it was when I wrote the first book years ago when our friend Verne wrote a nice thing for it. This was a time when there wasn't much talk about curiosity. There were books about the value of curiosity in general, like what curiosity is. But when I started to write about it, I started to realize I wanted to fix this. And I had written my doctoral dissertation on emotional intelligence and its impact on sales performance. So I was very interested in how to fix things with an assessment at that point. And nobody was studying this stuff. And I set up a Google alert to let me know whenever there was some research or some information coming out about curiosity because I wanted to know about it. And then after getting a million Mars Rover things and I took that out, I got nothing, really. Nobody was writing about it. But now it's like on a daily basis, there was a big study last week out of UCLA saying that, oh good, your curiosity can improve when you get older. And then I read it a little closer and it's saying state curiosity, like what you're saying, oh, that's a good idea, but then you don't do anything past that. The trait curiosity is what I work with, is I want you to continue to build and grow and get these ideas. So it's interesting to watch the progression of what's happened since my first book compared to the last book.

11:52Bill Gallagher: Well, what I'm noticing as you speak is that there are spontaneous ideas that I have and maybe people like me have. Then ideas in relationship to curiosity are different. So if I'm curious about a problem and then I have an idea, that's different. Or if I have an idea and then I'm curious about how to implement it, that's a different thing. And I think as a coach, like working outside with a company, the companies are having problems they're having and they're doing things they're doing. And a lot of it, they're not curious about. But as an outsider, I'm really curious. I'm like, why do you do that that way? Like to them, it's the way it does in their industry or in their company. And I'm like, I don't know, I'm outside. I'm curious. And I think that the beginners, if you go to work for a company or investment or encounter an entity or a process for the first time, you can be curious about it. And then the curiosity doesn't persist for many of us.

12:49Dr. Diane Hamilton: Well, you have that fresh kind of vibe going on, because you're going and it's interesting because some companies really get that, that you have to get an outside perspective. We hear so much about silos. You're stuck in your cubicle, you're stuck in your silo. But we're also stuck in industries. And in my first book, I wrote about a hospital out of London where they were having problems transferring people from surgery to recovery, and people were dying. And they tried everything. You look at your manuals, this is what we're supposed to do. You go through your checklist, this is what we're supposed to do. And a couple of the leaders were watching a Formula One race car event one night and they're watching them take apart the Ferrari in five seconds, seven seconds, put it right back and no problems. And they're thinking, well, why are we having so much problem delivering patients from here to here when they can do that so quickly? So these guys thought, well, let's just bring in the Ferrari team to the hospital and have them look at how we're doing things. And a lot of people don't do that. They don't get that fresh eyes. They don't go outside their industries. They don't think like that. But it made a huge difference. Less people were dying. They didn't recognize that people were talking over each other but weren't maybe repeating the same things to the right people or they weren't as efficient as they should have been. They wouldn't have seen that had they not brought in an outside party. And that's why consultants and coaches are so important because you get an outside perspective. You get somebody coming in going, why are you doing that?

A Formula One crew reduced hospital deaths

14:27Dr. Diane Hamilton: Because as you said that, it reminded me of a very famous study that I often tell people about because I think it was so interesting about how people just go along with rules, random rules for no reason. So this woman, she went into a doctor's office thinking she's getting her eyes examined. And instead it was a thought experiment to see how people go along with what everybody else does. And so every couple minutes, everybody around her were actors. They would ring a bell and everybody stood up and sat down with no explanation whatsoever while she's sitting there. And after only three times, she gets up and she sits down with them. We're going to do that. And so they found this really fascinating. They all kept getting up and sitting down. They thought, well, let's just get rid of everybody around her, take them back as if they're getting their eyes examined and see what she does when she's alone. So what do you think she does when the bell rings? Oh, she stood up and sat down. So they thought, well, let's put in some real patients with her and see what happens there. So they added some patients and bell rings. She gets up and she sits down. The guy looks at her next door and says, why did you do that? She goes, well, everybody else was doing it. I thought I was supposed to. The bell rings. What do you think he does? So everybody, we're doing this at work. We're standing up. We're sitting down for a bell and we have no idea why because it's social learning and it's comfortable.

15:54Bill Gallagher: It's so disturbing. You think about why do we, when I'm talking to people that are considering a coach for the first time, I think there's a couple conversations.

16:03Bill Gallagher: There are going on for them internally, right? One is, should I have a coach at all? And then the other one is, what kind of coach? Which coach? And I think people aren't really clear that almost any coach, right? Like, provided you're not mentally challenged. Like, you can think, you can observe something, you have any background, is useful because they're going to look at it with fresh eyes. Right? They're going to look at your business with some fresh eyes. They're going to look at you, your team, your behaviors, and there's going to be a certain amount of challenging and curiosity. But then the next thing they do is like, I really need somebody who understands SaaS, or I need somebody who understands biotech, or like, they'll want like an industry expert. And then the industry expert comes in, isn't curious about, is used to seeing all the things that you do, and gives you the same old solutions everybody in the industry has. I'm like, stop doing that. Like, get somebody who wants help. I mean, yeah, it's very…

Standing up when the bell rings for no reason

17:03Dr. Diane Hamilton: Frustrating for a lot of people because one thing I get asked a lot is, what do you do if your leader doesn't encourage a level of curiosity in the company? If you can't… It's just so hard because if it's not at the top like that, a lot of leaders at the top try to filter down this culture, right? And you can't really filter it up as easily if a leader doesn't buy into it. So it's up to coaches and people like us to go to these companies. And what I find is that the people who hire me already get it a lot. They know that they need to develop this culture. But the ones who don't get it, they hold onto it. And that's when you get all the company examples where they crash and burn because they want to hold on so badly to these ideas that they had because it worked in the past. And what works in the past often does not continue to work in the future because it works in the past.

18:05Bill Gallagher: And then, well, look, your industry can get wiped out. Everybody's worried today about whether the company or their job is going to get wiped out by AI. And who knows? It's so early, but it's going to be so unsettling, but you notice different reactions. With the advent of AI art, we saw artists who were like, oh, this is terrible. And then others who like used it, and they're making a lot less noise. They're just using it and adapting to it. And I think we see that again and again, companies there. I had a company recently, a client company, that is failing or has failed. And they, tech business of all things, and they were like, no AI, we're dead fast against AI. Okay, like there's the next last nail in your coffin. Right?

18:59Dr. Diane Hamilton: Kodak with their digital photography, right? We know this is something better, but we don't want to cannibalize our products. And it happens all the time that they think what worked in the past is going to continue to make them untouchable because they were so great in the past. It's just so hard for companies sometimes to see what's going to happen. When I sold computers in the '80s, everybody freaked out. They're like, this is going to take my job. I'm going to never have anything. And it took jobs, but it made, we have social media managers now. Who would have thought there'd be such a thing as a social media manager? You don't know that, right? So you don't know what it's going to create. It's going to change things. I mean, we've seen the creativity side you mentioned, some of the things, the artists and all that. I mean, you saw that they took George Carlin, they took his voice and his likeness, they did a whole platform of what he would have normally said and all the things that's going on in today's world and how it really got his sense of humor. It was fascinating. The voice was a little off, but it was kind of interesting to see. Of course, they got sued for doing it because it was his likeness and his sense of whatever he thought was funny. But I think they've worked that out since. But it's going to be interesting to see how it impacts the creative side. You need, I mean, now, of course, it's got so many issues. You're going to need the people who can help it become more in certain directions or give it the right prompts. I mean, prompting is the big thing right now. You're going to have prompt managers that do nothing but prompting, I'm sure, because if you don't ask it the right thing, you're not going to get what you want.

20:49Bill Gallagher: I think actually the prompt manager job is already over. I was noticing and looking at prompting recently and I had somebody share with my group and I'm like, you know what, if you just start a conversation, like I'm thinking about this, I'm worried about that, and then you can actually evolve the prompt, whereas in the thing you had to write in a very precise way like… but it's iterating so fast. Let's talk actually about some of those examples of companies who failed to do it. I was at a group of hedge funds and stuff and some investor folks in San Francisco years ago, and they were talking about different companies and Google was fairly new on the scene and people were worried about what it would do. And I was asked whether Yahoo or Google, where would I place my money and what did I think? And I said that, well, I think the technology innovation, the approach to the search is admirable, but Yahoo could simply copy the approach that Google is doing and they'll be fine and they've got the brand power and they already have the traffic. And so I said, I think I'd put my money on Yahoo and I guess that turned out not to be.

21:53Dr. Diane Hamilton: Copying doesn't usually help too much sometimes if you do it exactly the same, right? It's like MySpace wasn't exactly the same as Facebook. You have people that can take one idea and improve on it. And it's like, I mentioned digital, but it's the Blockbuster kind of situation with Netflix. If you think what you've created in the past, your Blockbuster Video is the only thing that anybody's ever going to want and these other people offer you this idea and you pass on it because nobody's ever going to beat you, that's when you get these stories of massive failures. I mean, some of it's leadership, some of it is just that it worked in the past. And now with Moore's Law and everything else that came out that everything was doubling and all these ideas were changing, people have realized that they can't stay static. I mean, I've taught at universities that were tech schools and I learned from all my techie geek students. I love them because I knew to hear all these crazy things that they were coming up with. And if you don't have the curiosity to keep up with what's coming out and what's the next thing, then you're just going to get run over. And I see it all the time with that buying into the confirmation bias, wanting to do the same kinds of things. A lot of it is leaders get it from their past leaders. They've learned how to lead from maybe somebody who was in there from Peter Principle that got promoted to his level of incompetence or her level of incompetence. And so you have to surround yourself with people who know more than you do. And whether it's a coach or consultant or whatever, you really need to have that kind of outside… who's smarter than I am. If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in a bad spot. You want to surround yourself with really smart and interesting people. And when I was on the board of advisors at DocuSign, it was one of the coolest things to be in this group because there was like 250 of us.

Four factors that block curiosity at work

24:06Dr. Diane Hamilton: And there was like McDonald's and Sony and every single thing you could think of, the CEOs and smart people. And it was Keith Brock, the former CEO and chairman, who put this group together because he would say, "Hey, I don't know all this." And he wouldn't just have the CEOs. He'd have people like me when I had my radio show or he'd have different types of people. And so he would get a variety to get different perspectives. And if you do that, it's a really very smart way to see what you don't know. And I think a lot of companies don't do that.

24:46Bill Gallagher: Yeah. Getting a glimpse into and looking in places that you're not comfortable looking at what you don't know. I think in many companies in general, but for sure around the tech companies that I've worked with, this need to be the smartest person in the room, competing intellectually is so prevalent, so overwhelming. And I think it's like awkward kids who were trying to prove that they had something and trying to best each other intellectually, and then they grew up and they're in business and like, that's not where we're going to really work well together. It's not how we're going to innovate and be smart and that kind of thing by always trying to say, "Well, I know that, I know that, I know that, I know." And yet it's like, I do it. Like, we all do it. Right? I don't think anybody is free of trying to show that you know something, that you're relevant. And yet it's not the powerful place to look. Right? Like, setting aside is not powerful.

25:42Dr. Diane Hamilton: It's tough because you notice the imposter syndrome. Don't want to look like you haven't been up on everything you're supposed to be up on. But you can't know everything. This is impossible. To try and look like you do, one of the worst things when I was in sales—they taught us, I mean, I worked in sales for decades, everything from pharmaceutical sales to mortgages, to whatever I sold, right? The worst thing you could do is pretend you knew something you didn't. And if they ask you something and you just try to fake it, you lost complete credibility. And they always told you, say, "Hey, I don't know the answer to that, but I'll find out and I'll get back to you immediately," kind of thing. And look how much better you look if you do that, right?

26:28Bill Gallagher: You know, it's very freeing. Like, there's a huge area that people commonly talk about, especially men, sports. Professional sports. Right? I really don't care. I'm not interested. And people talk about it, and I smile, and I nod for a minute because they're interested. And then they'll say something, and I'll be like, "Yeah. I don't follow the NFL or…" Like, I notice I hear about it when people are in the playoffs, and I'm like, "Oh, that's cool." And I might watch a few things, but, like, you know, my son likes to—he's even worse than I am, and he's like, "It's all sport ball." So, like, it's just not an area that I care about, you know, that much. But it's very liberating to say, "Oh, yeah. I don't."

27:16Dr. Diane Hamilton: But do you know that because you've watched it and given it an attempt? Or do you have that thought process because you were forced to watch a lot of it as a child? You know what I mean? I'm curious if you've tried it again in your older age if you find it…

27:35Bill Gallagher: Look. I had a professional relationship with Chicago Cubs with Mike Ditka. I had tickets to the Bulls during the Jordan years. And I've been like, I appreciate the game. I appreciate sports well played. I love it. I just don't really want to be a spectator in life. A little bit of it. I'd like to go out and play, to run, to swim, to sail, and I will watch a little bit of professional sailing. I'll watch a little, but I'd rather surf than watch surfing. So I like to… That's exactly how I feel. With professional sports players who are going to make more money than me is irritating.

28:20Dr. Diane Hamilton: Well, I was just like you. I loved Barkley when he was in the, you know, NBA, and I watched for a while. Then I kind of just, I gave it a shot. I got over it. And I think that's what we want people to do. We want to make sure you give it a shot. This is something you might be interested in. And the problem is a lot of people tell themselves that they're not going to be interested because I looked at this when I was younger and it was stupid or I'm not going to be good at it or whatever it is. I'm like you, I want to be out there doing it. And so I try things. I'm terrible at a lot of it. But I try. My golf swing's not as bad as Charles Barkley's, but I can do some things that are just to try it. I think a lot of people don't do that. That's what I'm trying to get people to think about.

29:09Dr. Diane Hamilton: And a lot of companies are good at showcasing their people who are very curious. I did some work with Verizon. They did some great stuff there. And I'd like to see some companies do this kind of thing. I went to their New York office and made these little videos of some of their—well, I talked two or three minutes about the value of curiosity, but then they brought in all these people from their company who were successful, who got this really sense of, "I developed a sense of curiosity and it helped me just look at where I ended up in the company," kind of stories. And they used these in all their onboarding courses and they played it throughout all their offices and everything. Everybody knew that we value this sense of curiosity. And that's what I love is sharing this to get people past that voice in our head saying, "I'm not going to be interested in this and this is going to be something that's too hard or I'm scared." And having companies get behind this kind of thinking and realizing we need to figure out what's holding people back. And that's what my research was about, what holds people back so that they can move forward.

30:19Bill Gallagher: As you speak, it feels like, or I'm noticing that there's a fundamental thing for kids about looking good. Somewhere we become aware of others in the world around us and then we're worried about not looking good and leaning into things where, and I think there's a decision there. Like I can't get curious. I can't try. I can't look into this because this is an area like, I don't look good. And I know like specifically art is one. At some point I decided I'm not an artist. I'm not good at art like that kind of thing. I know I'm creative. And then few years ago I was going through some stuff for my mom and I come across these childhood drawings and things, this kid's artwork. I'm like, you know, those look pretty good. At what point? Then I could kind of with a little bit of thinking about it, remember that I decided I wasn't like that and I wasn't good and that girls were better at art than boys, right? Like thinking this is like a very early childhood… Yeah. And it's absurd on the surface of it but that's girly and girls are better. And I'm pretty sure that at some point some teacher was discouraging or favored somebody else. I have like a vague notion of that and I chose out.

31:45Dr. Diane Hamilton: Well, you're walking right into my research there, you know that. I'm suggesting these things because that's what I researched was the factors that inhibit curiosity. I don't know if you want to go into that now, but you're talking it.

31:50Bill Gallagher: Please, yeah, talk about it. I'm curious.

31:59Dr. Diane Hamilton: Yeah, because a lot of what you're saying is what I was trying to figure out. Halfway through writing my first book, I thought, well, I've got to fix this. So I'm going to have to create an assessment to determine the things that inhibit curiosity, because if you don't know, how are you supposed to fix it? And there wasn't anybody out there that had created that. So I worked on this for years, spent all this time surveying thousands of people to find out what keeps us from being curious. And I found that there were four things, and you just hit on a few of them right there. But the four things are the acronym of FATE to help you remember it. So fear, assumptions—really that voice in your head, which you just covered a lot of that voice in your head—technology, which is the over and under utilization of it, and environment, which is also the teachers and things you mentioned. It's not just your teachers or your parents. It could have been your sibling that told you that was the dumbest picture they've ever seen, or it could be whatever. It could even be social media now. You don't want to put something out there, it doesn't give you enough likes. Oh, it's awful. You take it down. So there's all these factors that—it was really fascinating to me to see how much for fear we're all telling ourselves, I'm not going to ask a question in a meeting because I'm going to look stupid that I didn't prepare or that nobody else is thinking this. We all know the fear factor, right? We get that. But a lot of that fear ties into the assumptions, which you were saying, I didn't think I was good at that. I didn't even try it because I knew I told myself this or that, right? That voice in your head that says, I can't do it. It's too hard. I've done it before. And so they're just going to make me the head of this committee and not pay me for it. Whatever it is you tell yourself of why you don't want to do the next step was the second factor. And then the technology one surprised me a lot because I hadn't really thought about technology, and it was over and under utilization of it. So a lot of people who take the assessment think they're going to come in great because they know how to use technology. But yeah, you'd think, oh, those are the people who don't do as well sometimes because they either don't have the foundation behind it. They don't know why it works that way, or they use it so much that this research shows that ChatGPT and those kinds of systems actually helped people who weren't so good do better. But if you were a smart person and you really started using chat, you started to rely on it too much. And then your natural extra stuff kind of faded away. So there can be an overuse and an underuse. And if I threw Einstein a calculator and didn't teach him how it worked, he'd be a great calculator worker, but maybe not the rest. So we need to get that foundation and then make sure you don't overutilize it in killing your natural critical thinking and all those skills. Then the last one, environment. Cruel siblings, which I know a lot of us had, teachers, friends, coworkers, your past boss, current boss, everybody you've ever had any relationship with in your entire life is your environment. And the current environment maybe doesn't encourage curiosity at work. And so people just come in walking dead and just time to make the donuts is a famous commercial from my childhood. Every day, you just do the same thing over and over again. And so it was an interesting thing. I was really honored that Thinkers50 recognized my work as this unique thing because no one had done this. And so when I work with consultants and speakers and people that train people for a living, I certify people to give this assessment because I can't be everywhere. But I really find that when I give this to organizations, that moment is just so cool to see when they look at their own factors. Usually when I train people, they spend the first part of the day going over their own four factors, and then we create an action plan and all that to overcome them. But then after they figure out their own situations, I have them work on the company's situation, right? Like if they're struggling with innovation or whatever, whatever their problems are. Because once they understand their own issues, they're able to help the company. And I took that from a Disney playbook thing. I mean, Disney had gone to people a long time ago and they were having laundry service employees quitting like left and right. And you think as exciting as that job is, why would they be leaving, right? But they thought, well, we'll ask them, what can we do to make your job better? And just by asking a simple question like that, they found out all kinds of ideas and saved them a lot of money because people would say things like put an air vent over my desk so I'm not so hot and make my desk go up and down so my back doesn't hurt. And if you go to your employees and you ask these kinds of questions, you get the answers that you don't even know that you can get from them. And so that's how I work with companies. I do it a little bit, work with employees, and then you can get all this feedback you give to employees. You make HR look wonderful because they come back with this report of all the ways to fix things. Leaders get things to solve problems. I mean, simple things happen from just employee ideas. Think of chocolate chip cookie dough. Ben and Jerry's has made so much money from having a suggestion board. Somebody goes, hey, why don't you put some cookie dough in your ice cream? Wow. You know what I mean? You think about it. It doesn't take much.

37:28Bill Gallagher: Yeah. My mind is swept with many things, but I think about this challenge of asking why. Like, I got hired to coach a company a few years ago. It's successfully sold since. Brought me in. The initial thing was like, we need to get better at hiring people. And the heart of all the things that you talk about in the world of people, like we want to get better at hiring and retaining people. Like, okay. And it was a big lift. Like they wanted to hire like 400 a month, right? And I'm like, oh, I love this. I don't think I've ever worked on hiring at that pace before, but I'm game. And I'm never shy about launching into something I don't know anything about. So I started working with them and then I'm like, so wait, you're not planning to keep all these people? You're hiring this many because you're churning them really fast. And they're like, well, yeah, it's our company in our history. It's really normal. I'm like, okay, well, let's look at how do we keep people around. And so then like, we've already been working at that for a while and we tried all these things and they don't work and we don't want to work on that anymore. I'm like, okay, good. Who stays? Of all the people you hire, you didn't churn all of them. So what are the sorts of people that stay? And they're like, I don't know, the people who stay, stay. And I'm like, I'm trying to figure out that. And then let's try to hire more of those and less of the others. Let's not try to hire the volume, but get better at that attraction and selection. And that actually turned out to be useful, right? Because they were hiring all kinds of people who were just a bad fit for the company. They were in their industry, but they liked small independent companies. They didn't like a big company. And like, those people are never going to work with you because you're

Novartis saved millions by building a curiosity culture

39:22Bill Gallagher: Pretty big in corporate, things are highly structured around here, and it makes for efficiency. It doesn't make them happy. Fascinating, really important, digging into things, and that led to some useful innovation. Before we run out of time, why don't you just tell us about Novartis and what happened there?

39:42Dr. Diane Hamilton: Well, I've worked with a lot of companies. I give the Curiosity Code to different companies. EO was one I gave the assessment to, but Novartis is one that is a great example of just a company that embraces the culture of curiosity and makes sure everybody knows it. The way Verizon made people know, Novartis had, they would pay for 100 hours a year of just any kind of training and education and things to make employees more curious. They had Curiosity Month every September where they'd bring in hundreds of us to speak. I was one of many speakers that they would bring in to come and share different ideas. Everybody could pick and choose all the different training stations that they wanted to listen to for that time when that was going on. And it was really important that they made sure everybody could choose the things that fascinated them. Also, what I liked is they had employees who would give mini kind of TED Talks, like those salon talks. Instead of hiring somebody like you or me to come in to talk, they would have their employees do it. Anybody who has ever taught any courses will tell you the best way to learn something is to teach it, right? And you learn, you prepare, and you find things that you didn't even know you knew when you start to do that. And so they would let them pick a topic that interested them and that would be helpful to everybody else. So everybody learned in the process. So they did a lot of that kind of thing, and they actually measured engagement prior to doing curiosity culture changes and after. They found it moved the needle dramatically. And it goes along with the research I just published about a month ago where I studied C-suite executives and asked them how much has culture of curiosity impacted your engagement, innovation, all the different things. And what I found was very similar to what they found. In my research, it was a small study. It was 51 C-suite executives. It was across all the different areas in the United States. And they found that if they were small or medium-sized companies, they saved over $100,000 a year minimum. And if they were a large company size, they saved over $1 million. I mean, 80% of the small companies and medium found that, and 100% of the large companies saved. And I didn't even ask them how much more they saved than a million. So it's very interesting to me. It was just an initial groundwork research because nobody's doing this and I want companies to do more of this. And if you're thinking of doing more of this, I want them to do it because I think everybody does some research on their own, but then they don't publish it. And even Novartis did their own research about the engagement, but I don't see it out there. I would love to see more out there because every once in a while, when I talk to somebody, they go, Well, where's the research? Well, there isn't any, which is after arguing with ChatGPT for a long time, I found out that the reason it doesn't tell me what it is is because nobody's publishing it. And we need it out there. And I think it's so important for people who need to quantify things. It's out there. People have done it.

42:49Bill Gallagher: That secondary research today with ChatGPT 3 in particular, but like just all the deep research, it's really fascinating how quickly you can just do a wide survey. I remember one year I got paid to be a research assistant for a college professor overseas, and I read scores of books and research and made him little reference cards for work he was doing on political science. I'm like, what a job. But today I could do that whole thing that I spent half a year doing. I can do that in minutes today. It's the wildest thing, isn't it? All the citations. And getting into that, some of the most interesting exchanges that I'm having on behalf of myself or clients lately are like, hey, help me understand myself, or how do I compare to this, or what are we doing that's unique? Like it used to be you could only research public companies with any depth because that was where the data is. But today, like looking at smaller private companies, individuals even, like you can get fascinating things because it taps into such a big world and can do that. And I love hearing about companies developing that. We think about a Novartis dedicating time and money for something, right, a consistent scheduled ritualized way. And when we talk to small companies, they often say, well, that'll be fine when we get big, but we can't do that right now. And yet I know because I cut such a big range of company size that even the small ones will do like a weekly lunch and learn. And the weekly lunch and learn, you might show up and tell us about your hobby and fencing, I don't know, or whatever your hobby is. Pick two random things. And we'd all be fascinated, and then we might see something interesting. You think about the structure of DNA is revealed in a dream of two snakes to someone, a random thing like that, like bringing in some curiosity. So you might talk about fencing and then I think about something that relates to our customer relationships.

Small companies can cultivate curiosity with lunch and learns

44:57Dr. Diane Hamilton: Yeah. Well, fencing would be a great group team-building activity. You'd learn about a lot of different things. So you don't know what it is that people are going to be interested in that could open up the doors, like you said, to just unbelievable ideas.

45:13Bill Gallagher: Yeah. Well, so if you want to check out the books and more about her work, drdianehamilton, drdianehamilton.com is the website. We could keep talking for a while, but we'll lose our audience here. Probably a good place to wrap it. Hopefully we've got people's interest piqued. They're curious now and they want to know a little bit more. It's easy for me to say, drdianehamilton.com. Thanks for joining us today and spending a few minutes to talk about this. This is awesome. Great conversation.

45:47Dr. Diane Hamilton: Thank you so much, Bill. This was so much fun. I love how curious you are.

45:51Bill Gallagher: Yes. And if you want to know more, like, subscribe, turn on your notifications, get it wherever it is now, or go to scalingcoach.com. More than 630 shows now, so there's something on every topic to do with people, strategy, execution, cash, or you, the one in the mirror who's maybe sometimes too much of a lid on your business. How could you take that lid off and level up and break through and not have to work so hard to grow faster? Scalingcoach.com is where. Big shout out and thanks to our mutual friend, my mentor, Verne Harnish, who created this whole Scaling Up framework without whom none of this would have been necessary. Thanks to Anna Codina, who produced our show, returning producer now with this show and beyond from our past, coming back again. Delighted to have Anna back. Thanks again, everyone, for watching, for listening. Until next time, keep scaling. We'll talk to you again soon. Thanks for listening today. One last thing. If anything in this episode hit home, my book digs into it further. Busy Is Broken: Do Less, Scale More. It's all about how to stop drowning in work and build a business and a team that scales without you. Available right now with content samples at busyisbroken.com. Go grab it. Be less busy.