Bring your curiosity to work

Historian Yuval Noah Harari says in his bestselling book Sapiens that, even though our distant ancestors only lived to about 30, they had better lives. From our comfortable 21stcentury standpoint, this seems laughable. The lives of cavemen and women were nasty, brutish and short. But every day was different and they directly saw the impact of the work they did. Two million years of evolution have shaped our brains and bodies for these conditions.

When employees are tiny cogs in a huge wheel and they can’t see what effect they’re having on the people and the environment around them, they’re bored. Boredom is an emotion your brain has cooked up to tell you that you’re better than this and that you’re meant for more. “Stop doing what you know how to do!” it advises – and sometimes it screams it.

The world has changed so fast over the last 50 years that the corporate system we’re used to no longer works. Even at the start of the industrial revolution, people knew that humans would not thrive doing boring, repetitive tasks all day. But it suited the times – robots and machine learning hadn’t been invented yet – so people buckled down or starved. Regulation, standardisation and fitting in used to solve business problems. The emotion behind competitive advantage used to be fear. Now, it’s excitement, curiosity and enthusiasm. How much of that do you see in your workforce?

Wired for fun

Human beings are wired for innovation. We’re the only animal that refuses to accept our limitations: we don’t have wings, but we liked what they did for birds, so we made machines that enabled us to fly. Other animals that don’t have wings? They just walk around. To be human is to innovate.

Look at our organisations. In the US, growing up, if we needed anything, we bought it at Sears. If your washing machine broke, you went to Sears for a new one. It was Sears for the back-to-school shop, Sears for tools and Sears for all the family essentials. In October, Sears died with billions of dollars of liabilities. A decade ago Kodak was a US$92 billion company. It really is a case of innovate or perish – and it’s happening faster.

If we want to understand what truly motivates people and why, we need to look beyond psychology to neuroscience. In the 1980s it didn’t even exist as a field of study, but today, through technology like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), we can see what parts of the brain connect to which emotions. For innovation, it’s all about the ventral striatum, or seeking system. As the part of the brain that gives us an urge to extend beyond what we already know, it’s where curiosity is born.