Hello everyone, It’s been raining for the past few days and has seriously cut into my time outside. To fill this time, I was perusing the Internet for some HPT sources and stumbled across Fred Nickol’s site. Check it out; there is a wealth of information regarding knowledge work, training, Human Performance, and other topics. While looking through his site, I came across the article “The Role of Curiosity in Improving Performance.”
In his article, Fred presents several case studies from his career where his curiosity provided the mechanism to solve the problems presented to him. In each of these studies, Fred asked questions not directly related to the project he was involved in but resulted in solutions directly related to improving the performance of employees or systems in those projects.
The audience for this article appears to be Human Performance Improvement professionals. Still, it could just as easily relate to anyone working in Instructional Design, Learning Experience Design, or any field where the goal is to resolve a problem and improve the performance of a target audience.
The context of the article is also meant to encourage knowledge workers (this would be inclusive of all the fields I referred to in the previous paragraph). Looking at Fred’s long list of accomplishments, employment history, and education and training, he has been doing this for a very long time and has a great deal of knowledge and expertise in this field.
If I had a few minutes with Fred, I would probably ask him some additional questions. Is there a downside to being curious in regards to the projects you might work on? Are there questions you should never ask? As someone new to this field, what suggestions or advice can you give me regarding being curious and using that curiosity to improve performance? What’s the easiest way to get started?
Using curiosity in my current position is an interesting thought. Many of my projects are mandated by my company’s senior leadership, and any questions outside of the context of the project are likely to get you an odd look and a follow-up conversation with your boss about questioning senior leaders. That said, I can see areas where I could interject some curiosity to move the needle forward and push some people to think about what could be hindering their performance and get them curious enough to start asking questions.
This was a short post today; I hope you enjoy it. Talk to you soon.
Scott