Leadership Curiosity or Curiophobia: Unlocking Innovation with Spencer Harrison

Summary

00:00 - Introduction and Background of Spencer Harrison

02:48 - Influential Teachers and Their Impact

05:52 - Research Methodology and Organizational Insights

08:57 - Innovation in Organizations: Size Matters?

11:56 - Creating Contexts for Breakthrough Moments

14:59 - Curiosity as a Driver of Innovation

18:11 - Habits of Successful Entrepreneurs

24:32 - The Power of Surprise in Learning

28:59 - Fostering Curiosity in Organizations

30:52 - Balancing Curiosity and Control

35:25 - Curiosity as a Driver of Strategy

42:41 - Cultivating a Growth-Oriented Culture

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Full Transcript

Jeff Holman (00:01.212)
Hello again, it's Jeff Holman with the Breakout CEO Podcast. And I think I say this with every guest I've had on so far. I'm super excited to have Spencer here. Spencer Harrison is a professor and I think I've got something different add because Spencer and I grew up together. And I was, not only was I right behind him, Harrison Holman in the alphabet, I was always trying to catch up with him with the stuff he was doing. He's just one of the smartest guys I know. And he's...

He's gone on to do some fantastic things that we'll get into. The little show, how smart he is, but he's also an all around good guy. We've stayed in touch a bit and reconnected. It was actually our 30th year high school reunion recently, if that's an indication of anything for us, but it's so great to have you here on the show, Spencer.

Spencer Harrison (00:52.174)
Thanks for having me, Jeff. It's a pleasure.

Jeff Holman (00:54.566)
Yeah, no, definitely. So I can't do justice to your background. I've followed you on LinkedIn and I know that you're doing some really cool stuff. And it seems like you've gotten actually more active and vocal on LinkedIn over the last year or two, at least from my connection standpoint. And it's been really, like you're really posting some really interesting things and digging into some interesting concepts. And I'd say you also, I don't know if anyone tells you this, you also seem to come across with a very open mind.

when you're interacting with everybody else. And I think that captures who I know as Spencer from a long time ago. But tell us for the audience's sake a little bit about what you do and how you got to where you're at right now.

Spencer Harrison (01:38.796)
Yeah, my journey is sort of weird. you know, Jeff's right, like he and I spent a lot of time sitting near each other in classes throughout junior high and high school and post high school.

Jeff Holman (01:49.627)
You were trying to not get in trouble for the things that I said in class most of the time.

Spencer Harrison (01:54.006)
And vice versa, I think we were both a little bit of like the class clown, but I think always done with a sense of sort of intellectual curiosity too, right? I don't think that we were ever sort of disrespectful of the teachers. It was just sort of like trying to create energy. And I think in some ways, I think in some ways sort of,

Jeff Holman (01:59.452)
A little bit,

Jeff Holman (02:13.636)
I might have a few who say otherwise.

Spencer Harrison (02:19.83)
Like that ended up shaping my career more than I thought it would. leaving, like early in university, I thought I was going to become an English professor and study literature and creative writing. And at the same time, I had this job at Franklin Covey, which is a training organization that sells the seven habits of highly effective people. And I became, I became really curious about how businesses worked as I was doing that. And I realized.

There was just this really interesting learning curve there for me to sort of understand the inner workings of organizations. And eventually that led to getting an MBA. And as part of getting the MBA, I had professors that encouraged me to actually pursue a PhD in business. So in some ways I was sort of like getting the PhD I thought I wanted, but in a very different topic. Ironically enough, it ended up allowing me to come back around and study creativity and the creative process and how that happens at work.

as well as the cultures that support that. it's sort of this like weird winding process, but I think it was always with that sense of like curiosity, like where is there an opportunity for me to learn and how can I apply myself to that? And oddly enough, my dissertation ended up being about curiosity at work. So all those things ended up coming together for me.

Jeff Holman (03:40.37)
It's just meshed all together. It all seems to work out, doesn't it? So maybe a weird question, and I don't wanna dwell too much on our youth, if there was one of the classes you took in high school, one of the professors or teachers that you studied with, was there one that was most influential to you in maybe opening up your mind or maybe developing that curiosity?

Spencer Harrison (03:42.53)
Yeah. Yeah.

Spencer Harrison (04:06.264)
Well, I think I'm going to hit on probably the obvious one that you and I would probably have a lot of agreement on, but I think that there's actually several of them. And what I found recently in my research papers is I've begun acknowledging junior high teachers, elementary school teachers, high school teachers in the acknowledgement section to sort of trace the intellectual history in my mind, like where did these ideas begin to come from? So.

The obvious one I think for both of us is Mr. Jackson, our high school physics teacher. And I recently finished a paper that's about surprise at work. And we reviewed all the research about surprise. And what we did is we said, listen, like, there's a lot of research on surprise under the guise that leaders need to avoid surprises because surprises mean you didn't plan well enough, you didn't anticipate well enough.

You didn't forecast well enough. You had the wrong strategy. I think what was amazing about Mr. Jackson's class is he would teach us some sort of theory around physics and then he'd say, now how do we learn that this is true? And then everybody in the class would say, light it on fire, Mr. Jackson. And he'd that's right. And then he'd pull out some sort of crazy device and we'd blow something up, right? And I think what was amazing about Mr. Jackson is he understood that engineering surprise,

allowed opportunities for people to learn better. And at the time we were in high school, he was the number one AP physics teacher in the nation, in the United States. Everybody passed the AP tests. It was actually a huge disappointment if you didn't get a five, the majority of people did, but it was because he was constantly making his class this class of engineered surprises.

Now, I think what's really interesting for me is business leaders can do the same sort of a thing. They can actually help create an environment where people can be surprised in a way that allows them to learn, update their expectations, become more agile in their thinking, and then that ends up supporting the organization in the long run and making the organization itself more adaptable. So that could be something we talk about future, but for me, that class has had a lasting effect, and I've always thought...

Spencer Harrison (06:20.256)
If I had actually studied less about physics and just taken notes and all the silly interactions in that class and then written a sitcom on that, like I would be, you know, a famous person in Hollywood now instead of a business professor. Yeah.

Jeff Holman (06:32.091)
Yeah.

I am so glad you pulled out the voice. I'm like, should we do the voice on here? There's a voice. Yeah, so for those who don't know, and many of you wouldn't, unless you were at Viewmont High School in that timeframe, Mr. Jackson created the bottle stretcher. If you ever went to a carnival, saw those really stretched out glass bottles full of sand or beads or whatever it was, like he created that, right? and we got to learn from.

Spencer Harrison (06:37.102)
No, yeah, we have to do the voice.

Jeff Holman (07:01.797)
from him, it was quite an amazing experience we had. And it's really interesting that, as I've talked to other CEOs of, in my case, a lot of innovative scaling CEOs in tech and such, when I ask them about what motivates them, they'll often go back as far as their childhood. And many talk about, well, when I was a kid, I sold this stuff to my neighbors, but they'll talk about one of these influential people. that's...

I'm not surprised that that's just ingrained in us and I'm glad you shared that about Mr. Jackson.

Spencer Harrison (07:36.791)
Yeah, my pleasure.

Jeff Holman (07:38.77)
So when we talk about the types of organizations, well, tell me a little bit more about the things you've Cause I know you speak to a lot of organizations. You mentioned before that sometimes your research and your research interests are kind of proportional and your teaching is maybe the reverse of that same topics. like, what are you doing day to day to help organizations and get your message out there?

Spencer Harrison (08:04.354)
Yeah. so as a professor, a lot of my work and sort of how I build up my career and my credibility as a scientist is my ability to publish scientific papers. And my typical modus operandi for doing that is to go into an organization, actually watch what it is they're doing. Sometimes I even videotape things. I'll do interviews. I'm trying to see like.

What does work actually look like and how are people making sense of that work? And then I'll try to add other layers of data to that to see how we can paint a really full picture of what's going on. So sometimes that leads to me doing sort of like weirder sorts of environments. So we've studied things like t-shirt designers on threadless.com and how are they able to...

interact with the broader community there of other t-shirt designers to improve their designs and make winning designs. You have like a one in 250,000 chance of having a winning design there. So like that's a pretty competitive environment. We've looked at teams of engineers that live in analog Mars simulators in the Western desert in Utah. And they'll live there for two weeks and role play like they're living on Mars and see if they're

their inventions or their ideas about how scientists might operate on Mars might work. And then we've looked at sort of organizations that are, know, fortune 50 tech organizations in Silicon Valley and how they're scaling. But usually it's with a sense of like, what's going on here? What are the activities people are actually involved in? And how do we translate that into a practice that makes sense for leaders? So there are articles that I've written that are about these things from a scientific perspective.

usually for practicing managers, those are really hard to make sense of and the insights for them are buried. And so that's where vehicles like this podcast or LinkedIn or publishing articles and like Harvard Business Review or Sloan Management Review becomes an opportunity for me to get those ideas out to practicing managers. And then those things sort of lead to, will you come do a keynote with us? Can you come do a session with my top management team?

Spencer Harrison (10:25.506)
and try to help us understand some of these issues and maybe inspire us or give us some frameworks to help us make sense of what we're dealing with.

Jeff Holman (10:33.51)
That's fantastic. hope this podcast and some of the stuff we push out on LinkedIn helps result in some of the engagements for you. when you, because you talk there just about different types of organizations, different sizes, right? When you, and I work, you know, I've chosen, I worked early on in my career with like IBM and Intel helping them get patents and I've chosen to focus, you know, more exclusively the last 10 years on.

small startups, from individuals to teams that are scaling. Have you found that there's a, cause I would, I have some, I guess, some assumptions about it, but have you found that there's a team size where innovation really thrives? Does it thrive more in the large organizations or is it more present in the small, fast moving organizations or is there some common thread across those?

Spencer Harrison (11:13.838)
Mm-hmm.

Spencer Harrison (11:29.292)
Well, so there is a common finding in research that once a team gets larger than five individuals, then team productivity begins to decline for a variety of different reasons. But one of the reasons, one of the biggest culprits there is what we would call social loafing. So once there's six, seven people, then people can sort of say, okay, I think everybody's got that. I'm going to sort of sit back.

and let them operate. So you can have that just at like the team level. And when you begin to scale that up and you think, well, I've got an entrepreneurial team, they begin to build themselves into an organization. Now I've got 50 people, I've got a hundred people. Then there are these sort of inflection points where you shift from an organization where I know everybody because I was there for the interview and helped hire them to now it's sort of like N plus one. I know the person who hired them.

Jeff Holman (12:02.416)
Yeah.

Spencer Harrison (12:26.264)
to now I have no idea who these people are. Like they're just people that walk around the halls, but I assume we're all part of an organization. And as you get bigger and bigger, you have to be really deliberate about how you're scaling culture so that you can have these moments of insight and innovation. Otherwise, I think the intuition is, that the larger an organization gets and the more bureaucratic it gets, the less likely it is to be innovative.

Because what organizations become really good at is thinking like, what is it we've become good at? What is it we've learned? And then how do we routinize that so that we can scale it and do it more efficiently? And that's great in terms of making money. It tends to be a really bad process in terms of learning and encountering those new ideas that spark insights. And so the large organizations that are able to sustain innovation are ones that have been very deliberate about creating cultures.

and rituals and practices that support that innovation. Otherwise, you're much more likely to find it in sort of the smaller startups that you're talking about.

Jeff Holman (13:31.983)
Yeah, well, and I think that's what intrigues me. think about the smaller startups is that it just feels like it's a little more present maybe because just inherently the team size and the, you know, the chaos around it allows it to happen more or maybe there's less social. What did you call it? Social loafing was out of us. Social loafing. But yeah.

Spencer Harrison (13:51.266)
Yeah, social loafing, yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, there is this like push now where you have people that are trying to see like, how many corporate jobs can I take and have going on at the same time without people knowing that I'm doing that? And you can't do that in a startup. Like you have to be there. Like even if you're in a virtual startup, you're gonna be in meetings, in virtual gatherings so often.

that you couldn't be doing multiple things at the same time. Like everybody's wearing multiple hats, everybody's relying on each other to get the venture going and to get things moving. And so you have to be present and the work that you're doing is sort of occupying your mind all the time. And what that allows to have happen is like ideas are just constantly there. They're thrown up on the wall, they're in your head, you're sort of eating and drinking these things all the time. And in larger organizations,

Like people become really good at sort of finding the soft spots where nobody's looking here. I can just sort of hang out and people aren't going to expect much from me or maybe they won't even realize that I have another job at the same time. Right. And, and you can't check out that way in most startups.

Jeff Holman (15:01.329)
That's interesting. That reminds me when I first started at a law firm in Silicon Valley. I don't know that I would call it social loafing because I don't think that's what it was, but it might have been a similar approach where I had two partners at opposite ends of the buildings who were giving me work. I thought it was very fortunate because I... They didn't necessarily even like each other, so they didn't talk much. They would come with projects and I'd say, I get to pick and choose not because I was avoiding all work, it's just because if...

one partner had a better project, I would maybe use that, what you're calling social loafing to say, hey, I'm, you know, I can't take that right now. I'm working for this partner on this project. And I was, but it was, it's interesting that, you know, that can lead to negative effects. And I think I was using it in an engineered way to kind of pick and choose my own trajectory between these two partners. So I don't know that that applies here, but made me think of that.

Spencer Harrison (15:56.846)
I mean, I think it does, right? Because in a large organization, there's multiple trajectories you could use to shape your career. But in a small organization, the trajectory of the organization is the trajectory of your career. If the organization fails, you fail. If the organization succeeds, you succeed. But in a large organization, you can feel disconnected from a lot of that. So I think you're right.

Jeff Holman (16:08.933)
Yeah, there's.

Jeff Holman (16:19.857)
More cracks to hide in, huh? Well, I love that you're talking about inflection points and insights. I I think for our audience here, the scaling CEOs having breakout moments, my theory is that these breakout moments, I mean, there's luck involved, of course, but there's also a lot of opportunities for insight to create inflection moments. And some of those are just small transition points in companies and others.

Spencer Harrison (16:21.783)
Yeah.

Jeff Holman (16:48.633)
really do make or break the company. It's like we were going and we were declining or we were steady state. And then all of a sudden we had this happen and we took advantage of it and it became like the thing that put us on the map or whatever it was. And so that's an exciting moment for a lot of teams. How much of that do you think we can actually harness and kind of cultivate versus just wait until it happens type of thing?

Spencer Harrison (17:16.238)
So I actually think the most successful people and the most successful organizations, so both individually and collectively, are really good at creating contexts that allow them to have those sorts of experiences. So, I mean, you and I sort of touched on that earlier when we were sort of talking about high school physics and how if you have a teacher that's excited about

the subject and willing to create these surprises for students, then they're more likely to learn more often. Now, this is what's interesting about an emotion like surprise. And there's a family of emotions like this, but surprise is what we would call an epistemic emotion. So epistemic meaning it's a knowledge-based emotion. So when you feel surprise or confusion or curiosity or interest, what it's saying is I'm feeling this emotion

but it's telling me something about my mental state. So surprise specifically, it's telling you your mental expectations about this situation are incorrect, right? It could be a surprise birthday party. And so it's like, oh, this is gonna be an awesome surprise for me. Or it could be you show up and it's like, this wasn't done. Now you have to take on this extra task and it's a negative surprise. But in either case, like your expectations have been violated. And part of that emotion is telling you,

you need to update your way of seeing the world so that your way of seeing the world becomes more accurate. Now, the same thing happens with curiosity, right? And I think curiosity is actually the one that is probably most linked to some of these inflection moments, because if you look at the history of startups, both the inception of the startup itself is often a moment of curiosity. It could be sort of like the Hewlett-Packard founding story where it's like, hey,

Jeff Holman (19:04.123)
Mm-hmm.

Spencer Harrison (19:10.922)
it's cool working together, let's go in a garage and see what we can build. So it's this very open-ended curiosity, or it could be the curiosity of what happens if we just make electric cars. And that's a little bit more narrow and specific. But the point is, is that by beginning to ask those questions, it inevitably leads to these new sorts of insights. And there are habits that serial entrepreneurs, successful leaders use.

Jeff Holman (19:17.275)
Mm-hmm.

Spencer Harrison (19:38.275)
to create environments that encourage more curiosity, both for them and the people around them. And the benefit of that is you're learning, you're updating your schema, you're having these epistemic emotions, but also if you're doing it collectively with people around you, what you're doing is you're creating a group that is itself more agile and adaptable because they're constantly thinking about what does this also connect to? What's the next idea down the line here?

Jeff Holman (20:05.745)
Yeah, I love that you mentioned habits. I'd love to hear a list of some of those because I, you know, in talking with a lot of founders, what many people, maybe the ones that don't have your vocabulary about the epistemic emotions or whatever, they kind of just fall back and say, oh, it's persistence, it's grit, right? And I think, you know, I talked to one of my former guests on the show in an early episode. He was talking about the fifth, fourth, fifth, sixth iterations of pricing.

Spencer Harrison (20:19.192)
Yeah.

Jeff Holman (20:35.663)
you know, nothing was working until we hit that sixth iteration. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs would just say, you just got to be persistent, keep going. But, you know, it seems like there's deeper, it's deeper than that. Yeah, you've got to be persistent. You got to, you got to work past the failures. But what are the habits that people could, could try to, you know, proactively incorporate into their own either CEO routines or those of their team that would help to generate those insights or maybe make those more likely to happen?

Spencer Harrison (21:05.506)
Yeah. Yeah. So let's talk about those. so first, one of the things I think is interesting is clearly to be a successful entrepreneur or a leader, you do have to have grit. What's interesting about grit is grit is measured as persistence plus curiosity. So it's actually like, what was that? It's in the definition. It's in the, scientifically that's how it's measured, right?

Jeff Holman (21:05.649)
through persistence.

Jeff Holman (21:27.121)
So it's in the definition. It's in the definition.

Spencer Harrison (21:34.543)
So if you think about the example that you just gave where somebody's talking about, like we had this pricing model and this pricing model and this pricing model, you never get to the next pricing model if you aren't curious about is there a better one out there? Because if you're not curious about it, you just decide, listen, I tried really hard and we got to the end of it and we're done. But the curious person is always like, what is the next step? How do I figure out the next thing? What's the surprise that's waiting for me here?

Jeff Holman (21:55.344)
Yeah.

Spencer Harrison (22:03.242)
And part of the thing that keeps them going is that finding a wrong answer doesn't mean I'm done. It means, well, I went down that avenue. What's the next thing I can try out to make this work? So if we think about that, and what's also interesting about curiosity, just as another aside is, if you think about some of the most compelling ideas that have made the jump from social science into

pop management and sort of the broader thinking that we have as a society. So I'm thinking about things like growth mindset or psychological safety. All of those have elements of curiosity in them as well, right? So a growth mindset means like, think of myself as somebody that can continue to learn, which means I have curiosity or if I'm in an organization where you have psychological safety, it means I can try something and if it doesn't work, let's learn and figure out from that failure.

and make the learning the ROI on that failure. So curiosity is like very much sort of in business thinking and a lot of these other ideas that we have out there. If you want to think about sort of habits that allow you to be curious without having to worry about like, I experiencing an epistemic emotion or not? There's a number of different things people can do. And I do think the way to think about curiosity is to think about it as a habit or a skill.

rather than sort of it's something that's a trait and I either have it or I don't. Because what my research and a number of other scientists have shown is that even though there is some level of curiosity that we're born with, everybody has the potential to expand that capacity based on the sorts of situations that they're involved in. So let's talk about a couple of these. One is, oh good, yeah, yeah.

Jeff Holman (23:50.194)
Can I jump in real quick? I want to tell you just to because I think what you're again, like always, you're expanding the way I'm thinking a little bit. you know, what I'm taking away from that and tell me if I've got this backwards or something is because I think of surprise as, I'm surprised that I just got surprised, right? It just happened to me. It's reactionary. And you're not saying to wait until surprise surprises you. You're saying

we should be seeking out surprise in a sense, right? That is curiosity, is looking for those things that change the way we think, not just waiting till it happens and then realizing after the fact, that's different than what I would have expected. am I getting it?

Spencer Harrison (24:34.137)
Right. You're 100 % right, right? So if you think about like, why do people go to an amusement park? In part of it, it's because like they want to be surprised. They want that moment of like, I'm up at the top of the roller coaster. What's going to happen? right. then, right. And so, so there are lots of areas in life where we actually choose to purposefully, purposefully surprise ourselves. And we typically do that in scenarios where we feel like,

Jeff Holman (24:50.096)
Yeah, yeah,

Spencer Harrison (25:01.057)
a lot of the risk has been taken away so we can be surprised without having to deal with the potential negative impact of surprise. Because surprise is this interesting emotion. Surprise is in itself sort of inherently ambivalent. It has the seeds of both sort of stress and anxiety or fear and excitement and interest. And from an evolutionary perspective, that makes perfect sense because if you imagine sort of primitive human beings,

If they see something on the horizon that they're not expecting, they're surprised. That thing could be, is it a saber tooth tiger that's coming to kill me? Or it could be like, that's some weird shaped tree that signals there's water there and I need to go drink it. And so the ability to sort of find something that violates your expectations and then think, I might want to investigate that, but I probably need to do it in a little bit of a cautious way to make sure it's not something dangerous.

Like that's helpful to have both of those systems activated. Now when we're learning, what happens is if I can pick a scenario like an amusement park where I know the danger fear element has sort of been taken away so I can enjoy the other side, then that makes learning happen more frequently. So how do you do that outside of the amusement park? One of the things that you can do as a leader is number one, surround yourself with people that you really trust.

because that helps you feel like even if there's risk involved, I trust you to help me deal with the risk that might happen. And then the second thing is,

to do a variety of different things, right? So one famous example is Charles Eames founded this sort of like very historic design company. And it actually did a lot of the design for IBM's first computer. If you've ever heard of an Eames chair and those have become really popular again, like he created those.

Spencer Harrison (26:58.627)
but he would send his employees on what he called birdwalks. Like, want you to go to the museum and just look for weird things, or I want you to go over here and watch what people are doing. Now that became the foundation for the modern version of design thinking, where people are sort of taught anthropologically, like go out, find your customer and watch what they do and gather insights from that. But, you know, if organizations sort of develop habits like that, where it's like one Friday per month, like first Fridays,

Jeff Holman (27:05.009)
Hmm.

Jeff Holman (27:19.985)
Yeah.

Spencer Harrison (27:27.149)
I want everybody to go out to lunch in some weird spot and then come back and bring an insight. Or on like one Friday per month, we're going to spend a two hour lunch and we're going to imagine crazy scenarios. Like what happens if the Terminator ends up being prophetic? What happens if Avatar is our new future? Right. And then just have people think those through and sort of see what conversations spark and what sort of surprises come up. So that's one way of beginning to sort of engineer surprises.

And what's cool about that is as soon as you do something like that, you're not just engineering your own learning. You're beginning to engineer culture around you because you're incorporating other people in that activity as well. lot of CEOs or like, you know, senior executive teams will sort of go off and do strategy on their own absent other members of the organization. And so they'll come away with all these surprises and learning, and then they bring it back to the organization and people are like, what are you talking about? Like we have no idea.

where this is coming from, it's because they didn't go to the amusement park with them and have that experience. the more you can begin to sort of spread this through the organization as a practice, the better off you are. And there's a lot of organizations that have done things like that where they'll have, you know, once a month or once a quarter, they'll have some sort of practice where they'll sort of suspend common work activities to get people to think about surprises, try new things, hack things in different ways, et cetera. So that's

Jeff Holman (28:41.851)
Mm-hmm.

Spencer Harrison (28:53.571)
That's one way to begin to encourage curiosity, both sort of individually as a leader, but also collectively by building an environment where people can be curious.

Jeff Holman (29:02.881)
And have you seen any situations with like early stage companies where they're doing that? I think we've all heard, you know, I don't know if they're still doing it, but Google had set aside a certain amount, 20 % of time or whatever it was for their employees to be innovative or work on projects. Have you seen early stage companies that are able to do that successfully?

Spencer Harrison (29:24.953)
So I think most organizations.

Jeff Holman (29:27.567)
Or is it that they're just constantly in that mode anyways?

Spencer Harrison (29:32.003)
Well, I think, I think that that's sort of it. Like early stage companies are sort of in that mode. And then what ends up happening is the success stories that come from people being in that mode become the myths that begin to be the rituals that as the organization grows and scales helps inform practices. Like how do we have more of these moments happen? And so, so that, that is what you saw with Google, right? And this idea of 20 % time, which, which, you know, they they've actually sort of moved away from doing that now.

for a variety of different reasons. But I think that the more you begin to sort of bake in those moments early on, the more it becomes just part of the fabric and DNA of an organization going forward.

Jeff Holman (30:18.363)
Okay, yeah. So should somebody who's in that mode that early, let's say somebody who's hit their, they've done their nail it and scale it, they've done their nail it part of that, right? And they're now, they're zero to ones, good. Now they're trying to grow, they're adding people, they're starting to that N plus one organization, like you mentioned. Should those leaders be focusing on more on the fostering curiosity side of it? Or should it be more on the...

I think you kind of, I'm gonna say organizational, but you mentioned this concept of psychological safety and making it safe for people to be curious. there, or what's the balance between those?

Spencer Harrison (30:58.095)
So this is great. I actually was sitting down with the CEO of a mid-sized energy company and he said, Spencer, like I hear you saying that curiosity is really important. What's the bare minimum amount of curiosity I can encourage to get the benefit I need without having people do things I don't want them to do. And this is what's interesting about curiosity is there is this fear.

Jeff Holman (31:14.673)
You

Spencer Harrison (31:26.155)
And we're actually working on a paper on this, what we call curiophobia, right? So do I want to allow people to be curious? Because if I am a leader and then I encourage my people to be curious, I don't have control over what they're doing. So that's the fear that leaders have. The fear that your employees have is if you tell me to be curious and then I ask a question, will other people be mad at me for being curious? Will they feel like I'm interrupting what's going on? So curiophobia is actually pretty widespread.

Jeff Holman (31:42.427)
Yeah.

Spencer Harrison (31:55.535)
What's interesting about it is if you look at curiosity in the wild, and we had this fun data set we gathered from about a thousand working adults where we asked them to just describe a moment when one of your colleagues was curious. So we had a thousand of these descriptions and we went through and read all of them and we coded them for like, was this a positive thing? Did curiosity lead to something good or was it a negative thing? Only 5 % were negative.

Jeff Holman (32:23.771)
Really.

Spencer Harrison (32:24.601)
So the vast majority of our experiences of other people being curious are positive. They're not negative. But we often think like, you're curious, you're going to waste time. It's not going to work. So let me give you an example of this. Yeah.

Jeff Holman (32:35.897)
not productive, right? It's like this opposite. Curiosity and productivity can't exist together, we think.

Spencer Harrison (32:43.907)
Yeah, and what actually ends up happening is a focus on efficiency first will kill curiosity because people will think, okay, I just have to do this task, I have to do this task, that can wait till later. But a focus on curiosity first actually enables efficiency because what it does is it allows people to think, is there a better way of doing this? Is there another opportunity here? Is there something else?

And usually what people are doing is they're, they're engaging in curiosity in just sort of micro pivots. They're sort of saying, look, I know I'm focused on this task, but is there a better way of doing it? They'll sort of go away for 30 seconds, two minutes, five minutes, and then they'll come back to the task and complete the task. But what that's allowed them to do is they've expanded their map of how we might work. And over time, if you have people that have more varied ways of looking at things, eventually that leads to, and here's the new solution.

that makes this work. And we actually have this cool data set that we gathered from CEOs of mid-sized organizations. So on average, they had about 800 employees, but it was roughly between 200 and 2000 employees. So 500 CEOs. And we measured the CEO level of curiosity. And then we measured their top management teams description of the organization strategy. And what we found is

the higher the level of CEO curiosity, the more likely the organization was pursuing what we would call an ambidextrous strategy. Now, let me just unpack that a little bit. So what that means is strategies typically fall into one of two camps. So what we would call an exploitation strategy. So it's what are we good at? What resources do we have? What do we already know? And how can we churn on that really fast?

Jeff Holman (34:18.736)
Yeah.

Spencer Harrison (34:34.157)
versus an exploration strategy. What's something so crazy we could do that we're actually gonna disrupt ourselves? Now, like the exploration strategy is high risk, high reward. The exploitation strategy is low risk, but also incremental reward. The best long-term predictor of organizational survival is when you're able to do both. Take what we've learned, exploit that, make sure that we're getting some viable income from that.

Jeff Holman (34:48.955)
Mm-hmm.

Spencer Harrison (35:01.625)
but then also be looking for is there a better way? Is there a better way? Now, when you're an entrepreneur, you're almost inevitably doing both those things because you have such a cash crunch, you need to generate income. So you're trying to figure out like what works, how do we sustain our customer base or whatever it is we've got right now that works. But you're also thinking like, what is the big thing out here that we can do? What can this become? As an organization grows, what tends to happen is we shift more towards this exploitation.

Jeff Holman (35:11.717)
Yeah.

Spencer Harrison (35:30.393)
But again, what I'm saying is like, if you want to have a business that's going to survive in the long run, you typically have to be able to do both. What we found was low curiosity CEOs were just focused on exploitation. High curiosity CEOs did both. And this was reported by their top management team. we're like sending a survey to the CEO. Like they report their curiosity. The top management team has no idea that we're measuring that. We're just asking.

Like how are you, describe us your strategy, but sure enough, like this is the causation between those. So what's interesting then is the curiosity is sustaining the strategy of the organization. What's also interesting is we also ask the CEO to describe like their level of burnout. And you actually see the exact same thing. So CEOs that are high in curiosity are very low in burnout. CEOs that are low in curiosity are very high in burnout.

Jeff Holman (36:17.489)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Holman (36:27.315)
really?

Spencer Harrison (36:27.417)
So curiosity has a sustaining force both for strategically, what are we doing as an organization, but also individually for leaders. Like, is this something that's giving me energy that's keeping me alive, that makes me want to go to work every day?

Jeff Holman (36:42.501)
Yeah, that's super interesting. I love that you folks, I thought you were going to say, you know, there is kind of two camps, the exploitation and the exploration and the curious ones are like all in on exploration. you know, you say there's a balance between them. It made me think that's how a lot of service-based businesses turned into SaaS platform businesses are exactly that, right? They're the service-based business, like an attorney or a CPA, they've got that.

very stable, maybe exploitation type of strategy. just, I'm good at this. can make, you know, a good wage or whatever people need it. It's there's demand consistently, but then they're like, oh, I've now got a base. What like this, this strategy is working well enough. I've maybe de-risked the ability to go out and try something explorational. Is that a word? So that's, that's the balance that, that, that's kind of.

Spencer Harrison (37:34.989)
Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jeff Holman (37:41.137)
new to me, I guess. I would think a lot of, and I think a lot of entrepreneurs when they're first in, they're like, disrupt, disrupt, disrupt. It's all exploration. But maybe that's why we see such a high failure rate is because they're not thinking in that balance that you mentioned.

Spencer Harrison (37:56.749)
Yeah. And the thing is about it is when you think about the balance, the balance doesn't have to be like 50 50. In fact, it's probably nowhere near that. So one of the streams of research that I think is really fascinating is this work that neuroscientists have done on how many thoughts does a human have per day. And there's, there's a variety of different ways they measure it, right? Like some will put sort of like, you know, they'll do an MRI or they'll have, you know, magnetic links on your brain, or they'll just ask people to remember.

things that they thought about over the course of the day and keep a journal. So it doesn't matter how you measure it. Basically what they find is this is that like however many thoughts you have on a day, given how you're measuring it, the next day on average you have 97 % of the same thoughts. So we basically recreate ourselves mentally every single day.

What that says to me is that 3 % is actually where fascinating things happen because those are the moments when you're having some new thoughts. And so when people hear me talk about curiosity, they're like, like Spencer's saying, I need to be asking questions all the time. I need to be in a constant state of surprise. Like people can't operate that way. That's way too much, but like 3%, like that's very operational, right? And so what that means is,

Jeff Holman (39:16.165)
Yeah.

Spencer Harrison (39:17.471)
So famous Hollywood producer, Brian Grazer, he was the producer of Beautiful Mind, has worked a lot with Ron Howard. He has a wonderful book where he talks about how curiosity has been the key thing for his career. Now, that doesn't mean that he's just like curious all the time, constantly peppering people with questions. What he did for his 3 % is I'm going to take out one person per week for lunch and I'm going to have a curiosity conversation.

And it's like the conversation we're having right now, like, how did you get into this career? Tell me about what motivates you. Where did you come from? Right? And it's just like, like, I'm going to have lunch anyways. I'm probably going to have lunch with somebody. I might as well turn that into something that's like a growth opportunity for me and for the other person. But what ends up happening is over the course of his career, that 3 % compounds just like interest would. And then all of a sudden he has this massive network. So 10 years later,

Jeff Holman (39:51.855)
Yeah.

Spencer Harrison (40:14.979)
he needs to put together a cast for a movie, he knows the person who knows somebody else and he's able to make that happen, right? So that's like one way of beginning to build curiosity into a habit where it doesn't feel overwhelming. Like another thing is, like I do this guided question asking session with executives where I walk them through this question matrix and it's basically like magnetic poetry. It's like, let's take the word why and then the word do and then like,

Jeff Holman (40:36.582)
Mm-hmm.

Spencer Harrison (40:44.749)
Why do our competitors do things this way? And then let's take how and do, like how do we do it now? And then let's take how and could, how could we do it differently in the future? And what you're doing is you're sort of taking, can see those questions are not very different, but just by changing the starting words, it begins to bring up different thoughts, different patterns, different solutions, and then that allows you to get to a different spot, right? So Einstein once said, if you gave me an hour,

Jeff Holman (41:02.992)
Yeah.

Spencer Harrison (41:13.977)
to solve a problem and my life depended on getting the right solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes finding the proper question. And basically what he's saying is what the question does is it gives you a compass guide to where you're going to go in the journey to find the right solution. And a lot of times as leaders, especially as entrepreneurs, we start with the wrong question. So starting off with this sort of Einstein mentality of let me take 55 minutes to ask the right question.

Jeff Holman (41:36.56)
Yeah.

Spencer Harrison (41:43.097)
can be really useful because when you get to the dead end, you can quickly pivot to, here's a better question or here's a more energizing question. And then you're off and moving again, rather than like, I'm a failure, this didn't work. What do I do next? Can I get my team to still trust in me? No, because we've all asked those questions together. We realize there's other ways of moving forward with this. Let's take the next step forward. So that's another skill.

that allows you to make curiosity sort of a habit that allows you to have these breakthrough moments.

Jeff Holman (42:14.533)
Man, I love this conversation, Spencer. You're full of wisdom, like always, probably just more of it now than 30 years ago. if you had one parting thing, because I want to be respectful of your time, you've been so generous with it. If you had one parting thing for, whether it's a scaling CEO of a small company with 20 employees or a division of a Fortune 100, Fortune 50 company, working in a team environment, what's kind of the...

Spencer Harrison (42:22.893)
Hahaha.

Jeff Holman (42:43.749)
the parting words that you'd leave for somebody on this topic.

Spencer Harrison (42:49.219)
Yeah, I mean, I think one way of thinking about it is think about your business like a garden. And what you're trying to do is you're trying to figure out what grows, how can I cultivate that? And then how can I put other people in places where they can be gardeners over the plot of land that I'm giving them? And the reason why that's so valuable is

Lots of times, especially in high growth opportunities, like tech and service, we're often thinking about like, technologically, how do I engineer the system or how do I tap into this ecosystem? And so because the work we're doing is sort of more engineering focused, more technologically focused, we begin to think the organization should run that same way. Organizations are groups of human beings. It's a living system.

So this metaphor of a garden is really helpful because you're thinking about, want my garden to thrive. I want things to live and to grow. And I want to plant the right things here. And I think that that sort of mentality shift to when I'm thinking about the organization, scaling the organization, creating these moments where people can be surprised, they can be curious, they can even be confused, but I want them to learn from it.

The more I think about it as a garden, the more I'm going to focus on those growth opportunities for them and their ability to learn. So it's not about engineering your organization to get it just right. It's about being a gardener and cultivating those growth moments for other people.

Jeff Holman (44:23.704)
I almost lost track because that just brings so many thoughts to mind. What you plant where, day-to-day care, over time, year by year, things like there's so many ways to apply that. I don't know. I'm not sure what to take away from it, but I am gonna take away from it an opportunity to think about it some more because I haven't heard that analogy before and I think it's super helpful.

Spencer Harrison (44:46.766)
All right.

Jeff Holman (44:49.093)
Where could people get a hold of you if they want to bring you into their organization, they want to read some of your research, connect with you, what's the best way to do that?

Spencer Harrison (44:57.647)
So the easiest way to connect with me is on LinkedIn. I'm super responsive to direct messages there. And I'm always happy to get involved with organizations and try to help them create these sorts of cultures and these sorts of moments where people can learn and they can thrive.

Jeff Holman (45:16.037)
I love that. Well, Spencer, it's been such a pleasure reconnecting. Again, I'm a little humbled as always talking with you and super interested to hear all the stuff you've been doing. So thanks for being on the show and for our audience who's out there, thanks for joining us on the breakout CEO podcast this week. We'll see you next time.

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