When do companies fall apart? When they stop being curious

Companies fail when they lose the collective capacity for curiosity. Poor cultures develop through active promotion and rewarding of poor behaviours, subtle nudges and winks, inaction or by giving licence by turning a blind eye.

In every case, there is a failure to explore the anomalies or outliers which is the essence of curiosity. Focusing only upon traffic lights to signal danger or safety while ignoring the passenger who has spotted a speeding truck can lead to devastating outcomes.

Failing to spot anomalies in workplace culture can lead to system failures.Credit: Tamara Voninski

Too frequently in the aftermath, company spokespeople will claim they didn’t see it coming and that they were following best practice by driving into the junction when the lights went green.

The problem with spotting anomalies is that in corporate cultures that so heavily promote team-work, shared values and key performance indicators, if you point out the anomalies you are likely to be branded difficult or worse, oppositional.

Despite vacuous claims of “flat” organisations and the encouragement of “two-way” communication, the reality is commonly quite the opposite. There is still a common assumption that those at the pointy end of the so-called flat organisation are the ones properly making the decisions.

I have heard more than a couple of CEOs and boards patronisingly tell those lower down the hierarchy that their concerns are invalid as they do not understand the “bigger picture”.

Culture is messy and organic, in the way that good gardeners need to get their hands dirty in the soil creating the conditions for growth.

Curiosity is rarely fostered in organisations where there remains an emphasis on achieving agreement or consensus. Team meetings are structured to lead to a common resolution – too frequently some blather such as “we must all trust each other” or some other pretentious slogan.

The same commonly extends to conferences, where after several days of presentations, there is a closing plenary where “all the loose ends are tied up”. Almost inevitably this is in the form of a soothing narrative that smooths out all the outliers and counter-arguments. And people wonder why, despite years of engaging in such activities, nothing seems to change that much, until the company is T-boned by an unseen truck.

Failing to spot anomalies in patterns can lead to systems failures. If you are not interested in anything that challenges the dominant narrative or corporate values, then it is hardly surprising when things go catastrophically wrong.

This masthead’s recent revelations about the Swillhouse Hospitality group, included a report of an internal email from a manager describing an employee as having an attitude of “general negativity within the workplace” that was not aligned with the company’s core values of “good times”.

From the reported interviews with multiple staff members, one does not get the impression that curiosity was overly valued or practiced.

The problem with anomalies is that they require time and effort to attend to and to understand. They can pose difficult challenges for organisations, and consequently, it is not hard to see why so many prefer simply to pretend they do not exist, or worse that they have in place procedures to “deal with” such matters.

Almost always these procedures involve the person who has spotted, experienced or become the “anomaly” to be supported or counselled. While that may be a humane and sensible step, rarely do such processes lead to a proper curiosity about the causes and meaning of what has happened or been witnessed.

This is why it is so common for people to be paid off, generally with a non-disclosure agreement, while the organisation carries on regardless.

Corporate cultures rarely if ever come from the top down, despite the overly excited claims of the airport bookstore hagiographers of celebrity CEOs.

Rather cultures, good and bad, emerge when the organisation creates the conditions for emergence. It is an unpredictable process, that cannot be tightly controlled. Simply coming up with a few empty core values and putting up posters in the lunchroom will not cut it.

Culture is messy and organic, in the way that good gardeners need to get their hands dirty in the soil creating the conditions for growth. Fostering curiosity includes creating processes where outliers and seemingly oppositional viewpoints can be explored and not necessarily synthesised.

This requires great effort, and even more effort to avoid prematurely rushing to some soothing resolution that essentially ignores what might be critical warning signs.

Dr Jim Bright, FAPS, is a director at IWCA and is Director of Evidence & Impact at edtech start up BECOME Education. Email to [e-mail]. Follow him on X/Twitter @DrJimBright

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