Power of Paradox – Insightful Curiosity
When it comes to innovation, developing paradoxical leadership behaviors (PLBs) is critical for leaders. A recent study from Frontiers on “Paradoxical Leadership: a meta-analytical review” (Lee et. al., 2023) concluded that paradoxical leaders had significant advantage over other leadership styles when it came to predicting innovation.
Summary of Incremental Predictive Validity of Paradoxical Leadership on Innovation (Frontiers, Lee et. al., 2023)
In this article we will discuss one of several paradoxical traits that are important for innovation. For more on Paradoxical Leadership, please check out earlier blogs.
Insightful Curiosity is an important paradox related to innovation because it enables a wider range of ideas to be collected in the brainstorming or discovery stage. Insightful Curiosity impacts the quality of the top of the innovation funnel.
The last paradox we unpacked was Focused Innovation. Focused Innovation is important later in the innovation process when we are trying to get an idea to work since that involves experimenting AND persistence.
Important Paradoxes Related to Innovation
Dr. Harrison has found twelve pairs of paradoxical behavioral traits that are important for what he calls different subjects and stages of action. Insightful Curiosity falls into the initiating stage whereas Focused Innovation is in the implementing stage. These two stages are both important for successful innovation. Next time we will discuss Instinctive Logic, the last of this subset of paradoxes.
What is Insightful Curiosity?
Dr. Harrison defines insightful curiosity as the tendency to explore different viewpoints and make conclusions. The guidance he provides for this paradox is to “question everything but be steadfast in finding and following true principles. Greater knowledge can only be obtained by allowing what you already know to sit in the background while relentlessly pursuing a fresh new way of seeing the issue and being willing to be “wrong” about one’s previous knowledge.”
Focused innovation consists of two behavioral traits:
- Certain which is defined as the tendency to feel confident in one’s opinions.
- Open/reflective defined as the tendency to reflect on many different viewpoints.
What can get in the way of Insightful Curiosity?
One of the most common potential obstacles to insightful curiosity is a team leader who is very vocal in his or her opinions. As leaders, our opinions, whether we like it or not, tend to carry a lot of weight. If we express our position on an issue too strongly, too early this can unintentionally prevent others from either raising their concerns or bringing up alterative paths.
Clear objectives are necessary to provide direction and guidance to the team, however, depending on the level of the maturity of the team, we want to provide the minimal amount of guidance when it comes to what and how to accomplish the objectives. This is where another paradoxical leadership skill, situational leadership, comes into play.
With a highly capable team, when the leader over specifies what needs to be accomplished, it can result in two negative consequences: (1) the team feels micromanaged and becomes less engaged or frustrated and/or (2) the team does not bother to think of a better way to accomplish the objective because their leader has already told them how he or she wants them to do it.
Another obstacle that can get in the way of insightful curiosity is impatience or a desire to make decisions quickly. If this is a complex issue or new problem that requires brainstorming, then it is especially important to resist this temptation to act quickly and slow down instead. It can be particularly challenging to do this but slowing down will allow you to speed up later and usually results in a faster and better resolution.
I remember dealing with a setback on a high-profile project and at first, we kept trying different things to resolve the issue instead of pausing to do a thorough root cause analysis. It was not until we paused and took the time to tap into our insightful curiosity were we able to figure out what we needed to do differently.
What can help us with Insightful Curiosity?
An effective way to develop insightful curiosity is to have your team go through Harrison Assessments and do a team workshop on the Paradox report. The assessment only takes 25 minutes. By going through the assessment as a team, it allows each team member to understand how to value other team members that might have the paradoxical trait. Without this awareness, what can sometimes happen is team members with the opposite trait may devalue the paradoxical trait.
Let’s use the example below to illustrate. The red circle, A, is the team lead. Let’s call her Amy. The other circles are other team members. CF represents two team members that just happened to have the same scores.
This team is highly open/reflective so they would be a fun team to brainstorm with. However, a highly open/reflective team without certainty can result in inconclusion, especially since Amy also falls into this category.
Only one team member, D, has a high certain score. Let’s call him David. So, David, relative to the rest of the team, probably comes across as more certain in his opinions, even though he is quite open/reflective as well. What might happen on this team when they don’t understand this paradox is that David could be perceived as impatient because he might often say something like, “Can we come to a conclusion now?” This is unfortunate because David has a true strength of insightful curiosity or truth exploring.
Once the team understands this about David, instead of some of them being annoyed with him, they can leverage his strength instead. When David gets to the point where he feels enough brainstorming has taken place, they can lean on him to help move them along and come to a conclusion.
The key to leveraging any paradox, including insightful curiosity is (1) to understand how both traits complement each other and (2) to become aware when you might overuse or undervalue one trait without the other.
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You can also check out the blog for past articles on Mindful Courage, Respectful Candor, Collaborative Accountability, or Focused Innovation.
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