Garrick (00:05.559)
Hello and welcome to this episode of the Curious Advantage podcast. My name is Garrick Jones and I'm one of the co-authors of the book The Curious Advantage and today we're delighted to be joined by Stefan von Heudonck. Hi Stefan.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (00:18.846)
Hi, Hi Garrick

Garrick (00:20.727)
Welcome to the Curious Advantage podcast, Stefan. We've been looking forward to having a chat with you for a good while now. You've been the founder of the Global Curiosity Institute. You're a bestselling author and you've lived and worked in nine countries, I believe, including serving as chief learning officer at Cognizant. Can you share a little bit about how you got here and why you're here today and why curiosity became such a driving force along the way?

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (00:35.596)
Mmm.

Garrick (00:46.679)
alongside us. I I think we were on similar journeys at similar times.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (00:51.38)
Isn't it lovely indeed? Yes, actually you guys wrote a book a year before your book came out, about a year before my book came out and the Curiosity Institute is now about five years old. We have the biggest database in the world on Curiosity. We've got now over 12,000 people and 200 companies that have been analyzed in Curiosity. And the insights are still coming every day. It's amazing because...

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (01:19.242)
I was working with an MIT professor recently and he said like curiosity something like innovation 50 years ago. It's still such a moving target and everybody's looking at it from their perspective but it hasn't really found its core yet and that's why we need more people like yourself and the institute and more researchers to come up with a definition. How do I get here? I realize now I was never a really curious person.

Garrick (01:26.006)
Yeah.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (01:45.856)
We try to tell ourselves that we're always curious, but actually we aren't, I found out in the meantime. But I got in tune with curiosity when I was chief learning officer at Cognizant, really.

We changed the culture dramatically from buying resources to building resources because Cognizant is an IT company and there were just not enough people that were capable of IoT, Internet of Things or machine learning or digital engineering. So we had to train people inside, we had to build people from inside. So we needed a completely new culture around development, around growth, around allowing people to stick out their neck and be more certified, etc.

And we realized suddenly that not everybody was jumping on this wagon. We were giving all the opportunities to people, but only less than 20 % of the population and a big company, 300,000 people, I was chief learning officer, only about 20 % of the people were really keen on joining this new path. Although it came with more money, it came with more responsibility, gave more sexy projects, et cetera.

And we start wondering why is this and can we tweak it? And suddenly we bumped into the notion of curiosity. And we didn't realize the concept really well. Is curiosity something you're born with? Is something you can develop? And we just tried because we were a heavy kind of piloting organization. And we tried doing these short webinars with people and teaching them about neuroplasticity, teaching them about different concepts of curiosity, giving them ideas about strategies and how to be more curious.

Garrick (03:20.331)
Mm.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (03:28.596)
And three months later, when we checked in with those people, realized that actually and asked, did you start looking at world slightly differently? Did the specs that we give you enable you to view the world differently? And actually the majority of people said yes. And that was a really kind of a hopeful data point. But the magic started 12 months later when we started looking at the learning behavior of all the 15,000 people we had piloted. So it's sizable group.

and compare them to the rest of the organization. And we realized, and we saw through data that those people we had trained had an average 43 hours of learning under their belt for the 12 months period. While the rest of the organization only had 25 hours of learning. So it's almost double. And what we learned from this, and actually I left my job on that realization to set up the institute.

is that first of all, we need permission and an organization needs to give permission for people to stick out their neck for curiosity. And it doesn't come naturally, but permission is really important. And then another awareness that came to us is permission is just a first step. It's not good enough. It's great. Like companies that have curiosity in their corporate values and kind of where the C-suite is kind of promoting curiosity to the team.

but you also need to give people tools. You need them halfway. You need to give people tools and practices to really put it into practice. And those two together are creating the entire dynamic. And as I said, I left the company realizing that there was so little research done in this space. I needed to do something about it. You guys came up with your book and I wrote them the book and...

Garrick (05:16.748)
Yeah.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (05:22.668)
I started doing diagnostics on the individual level, on the team level, the organizational level. And here we are again.

Garrick (05:34.543)
Here we are again. There's so many things you're talking about which fascinate me and which I want to explore more. I mean, from neuroplasticity to strategies to be more curiosity, but also the data points that you've been picking up in your research. I really want to explore those a little more. But the first thing when you talk about we need to get permission from our organisations to be curious, that's fascinating. But then you link it up with tools.

My question is, what are some of the tools that you were giving people?

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (06:08.054)
Well, there's two of the different levels. The model that I'm using often is permission, awareness, intentionality. And you can apply it at the individual level, but also at the team and the organizational level. So first of all, this permission. Am I giving myself permission to lean into my curiosity? When I have a question, do I, for instance, when I'm speaking, when I'm in a team, do I allow myself to ask the question or do I stay silent? Do I?

Garrick (06:14.731)
Mm-hmm.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (06:34.956)
When there's something fearful, when I have a choice between going to, for instance, a stupid example, a new restaurant or a restaurant that I know already, which one should I choose? Do I give myself permission to explore this unknown? And once you have that, then you're entering the stage, once you give yourself permission, you're entering the stage of awareness. And you allow yourself to slow down and observe.

Garrick (06:43.895)
Mm.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (07:03.232)
yourself or your organization, your friends, your environment, are they uplifting me? Are they bringing me down? Am I in which situation do I find myself more curious versus not? Am I more curious about the world or am I more curious in my social relationship? Am I also curious about myself type of thing? And once you slow down and you observe you get some insights and then you're invited to take action. And that's what I call intentionality.

Garrick (07:33.003)
Mm.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (07:33.1)
Because there's all kind of doors that present themselves. Am I then opening those doors or do I leave them shut? With awareness and with... Because sometimes you might say I'm fine or it's too much for me. You can't be curious about everything, you know. Curiosity is... needs also some stability. If you change your job, if you change your house, if you change your relationship all at once...

Garrick (07:56.053)
Hmm.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (08:02.956)
is almost like a recipe for depression rather than you need some stability in your life and some grounding and some for you to show up curiously. if you're talking about strategies, maybe we could talk about more more strategies in a second, but for me, the model about permission and awareness and intentionality applies in many areas. And everybody can realize what it means for him or herself in that regard.

Garrick (08:06.38)
Mm-hmm.

Garrick (08:24.887)
Yeah, yeah.

Garrick (08:32.181)
These are the first steps to getting through the door. You might approach the door, you're curious, you want to know what's on the other side, but you have to, as you say, give yourself permission and then that achieves even more awareness of where you need to go. And then the intentionality is to go through the door and to be brave and within that safe space you need to have that safe space in order to be curious, whatever level you're talking about. I mean, it's fascinating, really useful tool that I think. I wanted to ask you about the data.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (08:44.812)
Mm.

Garrick (09:02.105)
What are some of the big learning points that you're picking up from the data points in the research?

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (09:03.052)
Mmm.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (09:12.588)
Well, there's many data points. For instance, there's one data point that young professionals show up less curious, with less curiosity than people that have been five to 10 years in the job. And that's counterintuitive because often when we're in the beginning of things, beginning of a relationship, beginning of a job, we tend to be more curious. But my hypothesis is that once you leave university and get into the workspace,

It's a completely new ball game and it takes a while for you to get bearings in order to kind of to be really at ease with accepting the new environment. Another data point, I've started the maturity, I started launching a maturity model since the beginning of this year. We were trying to check through culture and practice and the lowest score that we're getting is the physical environment.

Garrick (09:49.472)
Hmm.

Garrick (10:08.199)
Interesting.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (10:09.586)
is that at work the environment is not really supporting me to be curious. And I've just finished an article on art in the boardroom and what modern art does to our mental capacity and our decision making and our openness to others when we have or when we don't have modern art in the environment. So the environment has a huge impact.

Garrick (10:38.901)
Yeah.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (10:38.932)
on how we show up and often facility managers and people don't think about this. When we're staying in the boardroom, often we assume that the mere intellectual power of the individuals and the experience of the individuals is enough to create good decision making. But actually the environment has a huge impact. The team dynamics has a huge impact.

Garrick (10:59.639)
Hmm.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (11:06.396)
on the good or not so good decisions that come out. So workplace is a really important data point that came out now. The second dimension, the second lowest dimension is HR talent practices. And that's an area for many organizations to work on, I think, that we want to really encourage curiosity. Another data point is that after three years in the same role, people's curiosity goes down. Regardless whether they still

Garrick (11:18.774)
Mm-hmm.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (11:36.15)
say that they're curious because curiosity is of course a cool thing to say nowadays that you're curious. The same in relationships after three years in this because a relationship is also a role after three years.

Garrick (11:40.887)
You

Garrick (11:50.337)
We've stayed up at you for seven years, didn't it?

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (11:53.644)
Stay good.

What did you say?

Garrick (11:58.315)
I was saying it used to be seven years. The seven year rich was famous.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (12:02.474)
Yes, now probably I don't know what happened, it's my data points talk more about three years and that after three years, it's not that we're losing our curiosity, but it means that we have to try harder. that's challenge, it's a positive challenge that we and when we do this, when we engage more with customers of three years, with colleagues of three years, with partners of three years.

Garrick (12:15.093)
Mmm.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (12:30.668)
There's magic to be gained there. So that's a data point. Middle managers are about four times less ready to say that curiosity is a good thing for an organization. I compare it, well, I compare four times to both their seniors and the people reporting to them. And I think it's often curiosity at the mid-management is a lonely practice if it goes wrong.

Garrick (12:41.431)
What do you think? Yeah, what do you think that is?

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (13:00.716)
cause

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (13:05.164)
Everything around middle management is all about the desire for efficiency. They get marching orders from above and are supposed to manage as an efficient operation as possible. And changing the plane en route is a difficult thing, especially when the potential of going wrong is there.

Because when things go wrong, it's a very lonely proposition because it affects your career. It affects your bonus. It affects many things also your operative mobility and And with that When I'm asking people whether curiosity is a positive thing for an organization links to innovation, whatever 90 % say yes When I ask a follow-up question, are you inviting curiosity into your own team?

Only 50 % say yes. So curiosity is a practice and a theory. In theory, we think it's good. In practice, I'd rather have somebody else deal with it because I'm focused on efficiency and I don't have time for this. Or I don't give myself, I don't give myself permission for this.

Garrick (14:05.931)
Yeah.

Garrick (14:14.231)
Stefan, you've said curiosity is learned through language and we agree with that completely. But how does that shape how we experience and express curiosity in our lives and work?

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (14:27.436)
Well, and language is an important one at many levels. We think in language. And curiosity, we have this love-hate relationship with curiosity in society, in families, in environments. For instance, countries with heavy religious control or heavy political control, they don't want people to be as curious. And how that gets translated is through language.

And I'm often suggesting people think about your childhood. What language did your parent use around curiosity? Was it something good or was it something to stay away from? And how did it kind of manifest itself? And not only in language but also in action, in simple things. Did you go on holidays to all the time or the same place? Or did you go to different places?

Or maybe back to the restaurant example, did you always go to the same restaurant? Or did you choose new restaurants all the time? Were you exploring new cuisines? It's very intuitive that when your parents are creating an environment which is open-minded, exploration-based, etc., then you're more likely to follow that path as a child.

The same in organizations. Actually, I just did a post on this about curiosity being social.

Garrick (16:01.089)
Mm.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (16:02.38)
If a manager uses language that is very

exploration minded. If the manager is saying, I've just read this article in Harvard Business Review, or I explored this, or I spoke to that person and I got a new insight, then, and I've proven it with data, the team also follows suit and the team will also have a learning mindset. If the manager does not have this mindset and related language, the team will fall flat on learning.

Garrick (16:30.263)
Mm.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (16:39.818)
because they know it's not required behavior. My manager's probably valuing something else and the same is happening for salespeople, the same is happening for different people. That language is really, and then you find in many societies, like curiosity killed the cat, that's language, that's a sentence that's all curious George.

Garrick (16:58.155)
Yeah, Medieval. Medieval.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (17:03.996)
You know, our Curious George, always getting into trouble. So basically, we're telling kids in Curious George that curiosity is actually explorations leading to something wrong. And Curious George always needs this adult figure, this boss, to get him out of trouble. So, and that language that uses curiosity in promoting or telling people that curiosity is something...

Garrick (17:07.276)
Yeah.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (17:32.95)
that comes with a slight edge, comes with a slight negative connotation. Or in Polish, back to the religious dimension, in Polish, there's a saying apparently, I don't speak Polish, people told me that curiosity is the first step to hell. That's what they say. And that probably likely has to do with a very heavy religious impact that Oland had, that people, that the church way back.

in time, didn't want the people to stick out their net and explore and do things. Look at St. Augustine, you know, he said that curiosity is getting us away from our focus on God.

Garrick (18:16.489)
It's fascinating. You talk about the legacy of these structures from our parents and the language they use or our home life and how we've been brought up and our countries and the culture of our countries and the legacy of those cultures all have an impact on our view and our openness to be curious. And yet we think curiosity is so important in this digital age and being able to keep it being able to look further and broader.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (18:41.141)
Mmm.

Garrick (18:45.587)
and having sets of tools that enable us to not accept what we first find or just follow things as they're given to us, but really to question things. You talked about these business structures and how they draw from the models of the church and the military, and that all makes sense. mean, some of these things go back thousands of years, back to Alexander the Great and the way he organized Persia and so on.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (19:03.116)
Mmm.

Garrick (19:14.827)
How do these old paragliding still shape our organizations is one thing, but then we know that they're and they're limiting curiosity sometimes for control purposes, as you've said. But what's the option? What's the alternative? And what is the reward, do you think? Because if we need a new shape for a new age, what do you think that is? And then why, know, what is the reward that we get?

by being open and being more curious in our countries and our homes and our organisations.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (19:49.522)
It's a... Wow, this is a philosophy session, beautiful. Now, I think church and religion have had a huge impact on how we started structuring companies. In the Industrial Revolution, the only model that we had or the people then had about big organizations was indeed those two systems.

Garrick (19:53.303)
Thank

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (20:16.394)
And it's quite interesting and Frederick Taylor picked up on it later on, but probably I'll pick out one dimension is the role of harmony. Harmony in religious environments, also in the army are hugely important. And harmony means not rocking a boat, not challenging the status quo. Innovation goes against harmony.

In many organizations, even customers are disruptive against the harmony. I find it amazing whether CEO kind of when we see online that the CEO is spending 30%, 40, 50 % of his time with customers as if it's an anomaly because indeed most people are spending their energy internally kind of structuring and managing and organizing. And so the role of harmony and

Garrick (20:44.758)
Hmm.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (21:14.484)
In my language, curiosity, the opposite is conformity.

Garrick (21:17.931)
Hmm.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (21:19.582)
And conformity and harmony go probably hand in hand because harmony is keeping the same and not rocking the boat and conformity is staying with the past. And it's about keeping while curiosity is about seeking. And that's already kind of a dimension that is preventing many organizations deep down unconsciously at the organizational level from wanting to go the extra mile and then

Garrick (21:50.241)
This is fascinating for me because I understand completely the relationship between harmony and conformity.

But it also plays into people's need for structure and safety. And you can see in turbulent times, mean, it can go extreme. It may even end up in people seeking solace in fascism, if you like. Something which is structured or even totalitarianism because the world seems too complex and the world seems too out of control. And it makes people.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (22:21.1)
Mmm.

Garrick (22:22.773)
And so you have this question, we have these tendencies in our society. We saw it before the Second World War in Weimar. We're seeing it, there are elements of it today, where the amount of chaos that is about leads people to choose more safe structures, sometimes beyond just the church, right? And then the question is,

If we're saying that, I really love when you say the difference between keeping and seeking. If there's something to be gained from being seekers and seeking and having that kind of relationship with information and the world, what does that mean for all the chaos? How do I cope with the chaos and how do I cope with that need for safety that might drive me to become a keeper rather than a seeker?

And how do you deal with this? And you know what I'm saying?

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (23:15.692)
Let's eat.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (23:21.15)
I have probably two thoughts. First of all, let's go back to the notion of permission, awareness and intentionality. And that already kind of helps somehow. Am I giving permission to curiosity or am I giving permission to disharmony or conformity? And then what follows are the awareness and intentionality level. That's probably...

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (23:44.757)
one dimension and another dimension, probably three dimensions that we said earlier that curiosity needs stability.

Stress is one of the barriers to curiosity. And the more stress we experience around ourselves, all kind of stress, can be personal stress, be societal stress, can be social media stress, can be many other things. The more we have stress, the less we're ready to explore the new. Because as you said, the world is too complex and we have a desire to make the world more simple.

And then probably the third dimension is of those two conformity and curiosity, conformity is a stronger one.

Because there's almost this gravitational pull towards conformity. In the beginning we're curious, but after a while we settle for this new reality. We stop asking questions. We sometimes don't even dare to ask questions because we create this new reality we feel comfortable with. When we're setting up a company or we're setting up a department, it's difficult for the first generation to change because they've created the past type of thing. So this conformity is a

Garrick (24:38.583)
Mm-hmm.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (25:02.134)
the stronger one and that's why curiosity for me needs its intentionality. Because without intentionality we're always, it's kind of like an elastic band that pulls us towards its conformity because the more we let it do its job, the more it comfortable. It's an illusion of comfortable. And the more we need this intentionality to pull us the other way. That's why curiosity is hard.

That's why it requires energy. A little bit of pulling in the other direction gets us into learning new stuff, exploring new worlds, getting better with our relationship, exploring ourselves. If we pull even harder to the direction of curiosity, we explore completely new terrains, which is even harder. But of course, the rewards are bigger, but it's more...

Garrick (25:53.495)
There we go. The rewards are bigger. It may not be safe or may not feel safe or as you say, it's an illusion. I really love that. But the rewards are actually better because it's slightly more difficult. It's a difficult path, more difficult path and it requires intentionality as you say and bravery and courage. But the rewards are better.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (26:04.917)
Hmm

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (26:13.42)
Mm.

Garrick (26:18.251)
We're talking to Stefan van Hoodonck. He's the founder of the Global Curiosity Institute and author of the best-selling book, The Workplace Curiosity Manifesto, and the newly released book, Curiosity, the Secret Ingredient for Success in Personal and Professional Growth.

After working initially in investment consulting and setting up executive education at the China European International Business School in China, Stefano held executive roles as chief learning officer in Fortune 200 companies like Nokia and Royal, Philips and Cognizant and Aramco, Agfa and Flipkart. He has lived and worked in Belgium, France, Hong Kong, China, Finland, the Netherlands, India, Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom. And his last role was that of chief learning officer for Cognizant, where he oversaw L &D for over 300,000 associates across the globe.

So, fascinating conversation, Steph. I want to go on. In your book, you distinguish between intellectual, empathic, and personal curiosities. And why is it important to separate these? And how can our organizations nurture each one, I guess? what's the difference between intellectual, empathic, and personal curiosity?

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (27:27.775)
I've differentiated between these two to highlight that curiosity is a complex matter. We all have a surface level definition. If you ask anybody in the street, we have some definition of curiosity, but it's kind of a quick definition. We use language, but we don't think about language. That's the role of philosophers. That's the role of authors. You know, that's what I'm doing.

They are thinking deep next to my farming work, but we can talk about it later.

Garrick (27:58.19)
We can do that.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (28:06.538)
I lost my track a little bit. Can you repeat?

Garrick (28:08.151)
We're about the difference between intellectual, empathic and personal.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (28:11.926)
yes, yes. So I try to create the difference between to make it meaningful and to highlight that this is a complex nature for the typical definition that we have in society is curiosity about the world. Kind of being curious about exploration, a child exploring a pebble on the street or on the beach or an Einstein discovering the universe. It's kind of intellectual curiosity that links to learning, that links to exploring new worlds.

And that's really important as it links at an organizational level to creativity, to innovation and growth. But these are not the only dimensions. What I found that in our private lives, but also in our professional lives, we also have to deal with both people. And it has a completely different dynamic because people talk back. Stuff in the world does not talk back. As one differentiator already.

Garrick (29:08.203)
Hell is on people, some people say.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (29:08.716)
Yes, curiosity about the people that I work with, the people that I live with, the people in my society, the people beyond my society, strangers, is also a really important thing and very different from curiosity. When we're talking about curiosity as linked to kids, like empathic curiosity only arrives at the later age. It has nothing to do with curiosity about the world.

And then the third dimension, and that's the hardest dimension, is curiosity of myself. Am I ready to explore my deeper beliefs, even my limiting beliefs, the thing that keep me to where I am or that propel me towards future great things? That's probably an insight that often people get from the book or from my speeches, is that curiosity can also go inward. We have two eyes to look at the world and to look at others.

Garrick (29:42.039)
Hmm.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (30:07.104)
But it's harder for us to go inside. Apart from the stories that we tell ourselves, and I'm a nice guy and I know a little bit about curiosity, you know, and I'm... But if you ask my partner, or if you ask my mother, or my friends, they'll come up with a very different version of me. I have, I'm now 50... I always get it wrong, 57 I think. And that means that I've got 57 years of dust on my soul that prevent me from going inward.

While the better I am at understanding myself through meditation, through slowing down, through observing my deeper thing, to observing my breath, for instance, the more I can be strong.

in my curiosity of others, my curiosity of the world, including my dealing with things like new trends like AI. Because curiosity of the self gives me roots, gives me wings at the same time, because that's a function of resilience. That's a function of happiness.

Garrick (31:17.111)
There are so many directions we can go. Let's start with AI. What's your view on AI? And that's disrupting everything. We can see it happening live in the economies and geopolitics right now. How does that relate to our curiosity and our need to be strong and our resilience that you talk about?

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (31:23.007)
Mmm.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (31:40.36)
It's, I'm still.

I'm still not entirely sure. If you're on social media, you either, for a long time, you had to be a techno-optimist, otherwise you were an old fart or an old somebody in the Middle Ages. And it's all about extremes that I find. what I'm trying to be somewhere in the middle and seeing whether AI has

Garrick (31:56.097)
Yeah.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (32:15.884)
is good, which we have to embrace it, but at the same time, not blindly. I've been doing some work around comparing AI to other new technology introductions. And I used, for instance, internet we can use or maybe GPS. GPS has brought us many advantages, safety and efficiency. When there's a traffic jam, we take another route. But when you're actually going a bit deeper in what research has found is that we've lost a couple of skills.

while introducing GPS, for instance, we've lost navigation skills. We find it weird to ask people for their directions. A couple of months ago, my GPS, my smartphone was broken. So I printed out the directions to the place I had to go and speak. And two times on the road, I stopped my car and asked the direction to a guy and they talked to me. They laughed at me as if, nowadays nobody's asking for directions anymore, but probably the worst.

learning is learned helplessness. Is that when our machine is breaking, when we don't have a GPS for the day or when it doesn't work or the signal is not there, some people are not even making the travel anymore. I'm not even going from ATB because they're afraid that without their tool, they can't get there. so what I'm just trying to say is whenever we are introducing something, it comes with many great benefits, but it will also come at a cost.

Garrick (33:19.063)
Yeah.

Garrick (33:46.807)
Mm.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (33:47.242)
And I don't think that we know enough about the cost, specifically maybe in the discussion around, shall we introduce AI into schools? When there's a lot of discussions going around whether we should introduce or whether we should roll back smartphones in schools, for instance.

Garrick (34:06.647)
heard that too, we ban them in the UK. They're not allowing smartphones into the schools at all now.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (34:14.154)
You see, so why if we've learned the hard way with just reading a book on the anxious generation about what social media has been doing for girls and with games have been doing for boys and kind of rises in anxiety, rises in suicide rates, et cetera, because of the algorithms very much. It's not only correlations, it's even causation that is presenting in the book. So.

Garrick (34:38.359)
Beautiful.

Garrick (34:44.477)
jury's out. Proceed with caution is what you're saying. Proceed with caution.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (34:44.78)
I think so.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (34:49.822)
I think so, yeah. And also maybe one extra point, there was a recent research that the Financial Time brought out that in the last 12 or 13 years, literacy rate and mathematical kind of rate of our kids and their parents, adults have been coming down. And my deeper question would be, can AI reverse that trend?

Garrick (35:10.069)
Hmm.

Garrick (35:16.919)
There's research showing that people are asking better questions because of the AI. so that there is a growing trend of people being able to specify in ways that they weren't before because we are in turn drained by AI. Every time we ask a prompt, we go into it, we have to ask further questions, we get better at asking questions. So as you say, some things are gained and some things are lost. But what's beneficial to all of us remains to be seen.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (35:41.408)
Yep. Yep.

Garrick (35:47.191)
I really wanted to ask you about farming. I'm curious because we're coming to the end of our conversation, which has been very wide ranging and I'm going to try and do a summary as best I can. But before, tell me about farming. You became a part-time farmer, you grow your own food, you became more self-sufficient, you eat what you produce. How has this changed you or what got you there?

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (35:52.169)
Mmm.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (36:16.874)
Well, we have a country house in the south of Belgium and a couple of years ago I saw this land for sale over Christmas. I called my wife because for a long time I just wanted to have some lands to play with. And we discussed and we decided to buy it. And you have to understand our daughter, she was really heavy on the sustainability track. She was one of those youngsters kind of who were fighting for sustainability.

Garrick (36:39.788)
Hmm.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (36:45.79)
and she was doing that at national levels and even at European levels and she got completely burned out. And she was talking to politicians and she was talking to industry who couldn't give...

Garrick (37:00.779)
Yep.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (37:01.052)
He didn't care really. It was all nice to have and as a youngster you keep on fighting. And I probably took the baton from her and I said okay, let me do it at my level. And let me try to, at a micro level, start a little farm doing the right things and learning at the same time. And it turned out to be my curiosity project. I'm learning so much.

Garrick (37:25.303)
I have to ask, my curiosity project is music. We can talk about how having projects like this really teaches us and makes us go deep. But tell me about the farm and what you've been looking

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (37:39.752)
It's, well, it's actually, you're absolutely right. Maybe if you're, when we talked earlier, that curiosity goes down after the initial phases. It's not the case with hobbies and passions. Their curiosity always goes up and it always has to do with completely intrinsic and we're allowing ourselves to suck at it. And that's why I kind of, we keep on. And in the meantime, we have six hectares, 60,000 square meters. I've got

Garrick (38:00.085)
Yeah.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (38:10.027)
Close to 300 trees. I just planted three weeks ago 130 vines. I have a huge variety of, for instance just on the apple side we have almost 50 varieties of apples. Lots of...

Garrick (38:15.937)
source.

Garrick (38:24.299)
I'm looking forward to your first bottle of wine, Stefan.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (38:27.628)
Well, I stopped drinking a couple of months ago, so maybe we'll just eat the grapes or have some juice. But I'm trying to... I'm also a beekeeper in the meantime. Everything is organic and regenerative. And we created a hedge around the property of now close to 6,000 kind of bee-loving bushes and shrubs and elderflower and all these types of...

flowery trees and it's I often say that I spend about 80 % of curiosity and then the other 80 % I spend on the farm and it feels that way because it's it helps me to combine nature and culture and I'm learning so much from

from this project about myself, about nature, because that's a big curious project I think sustainability and keeping and I hope I'm a role model in the community that we don't have to use land for creating feed for animals but we can create

Garrick (39:24.279)
Hmm.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (39:45.984)
We can use the land to create food for immediately for humans. I also have a of a community garden on the land where we're inviting families to grow vegetables together, to harvest them together. it's kind of an equal, everybody who works gets an equal share in the product. So it's a very local, it gives me energy as the curiosity work is.

Garrick (40:06.167)
Amazing.

Garrick (40:11.841)
Yeah, it's amazing. mean, you we learn from doing and you are doing more than most and it's inspiring. It really is. I mean, we've talked about so many things like insights about curiosity from neuroplasticity to strategies to be curious. We've talked about some of the learning that you've been done with your data points and how organizations have to give permission to be curious and how permission is just the first step.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (40:16.213)
Mm.

Garrick (40:40.971)
The second is awareness and that leads to intentionality and that can happen at all levels, whether it's a personal level or the team level or at a social level. But we need these to connect with action in order to be curious. We've been learning about some of the data points that you've been accumulating in the institute. Things like young professionals are less curious when they first start. Our middle managers are less likely to be curious or say that it's important because it's...

often a lonely practice at that level, but that also how important the physical environment is to curiosity and why things like art in the boardroom is just a small step to having a huge impact. Talked about HR and talent practices and how after three years in a single role, we might become less curious and how we probably need to keep things shifting in order to stay awake and alive.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (41:16.202)
Mm.

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (41:33.782)
Mm.

Garrick (41:36.053)
We also had a fantastic philosophical conversation about curiosity and language and how language is used and where it comes from and how we were trained in language has an impact on our curiosity and how the language that managers use has a huge impact on their teams. also about how curiosity needs stability and stress is a barrier to curiosity. But...

All of these things are only illusions and how curiosity is about it, our intention, our intention to learn new things and to take things further and to get over our fears and how we need to look at ourselves because curiosity can be done at the level of the team and the society but it also there's a place for us to examine our own selves and be curious there. The role of structures and the question of harmony and the question of

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (42:31.404)
Mm.

Garrick (42:31.711)
Are you a keeper or are you a seeker? Are you just choosing safety and security for that sake or are you finding a new security within seeking and allowing us to change and grow because the rewards are better from seeking than they are from keeping? We also talked about intellectual, empathic, and personal curiosity and we talked about farming.

and the need for resilient and having a curious project allows us to learn about ourselves and the world around us and allows us to become resilient in the face of so much change. The cost of not doing so, I think, is greater than the cost of staying alive and being curious. And these are the things we've...

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (43:22.54)
you

Garrick (43:28.383)
you've talked with me about today and are hugely simulated and just fascinating. Stefan, if you have one thing to leave our listeners with, what would it be?

Stefaan Van Hooydonk (43:40.108)
Well, one strategy that I find really useful is change your script. Think about what you would normally or ordinarily say in certain situations and change it. For instance, if you like coffee and you go into your coffee shop and the person says hello or how you do or hiya or whatever, instead of just saying something nonsensical and something formulaic,

Say for instance, oh, today, and you look at the name pick, you say, Garak, today I'm a 7.2, what about you? And suddenly by changing that script that is expected, you're inviting or you're opening the door to such a wonderful conversation with that barista. You can do the same with your kids. When your kids come home in the evening after school, don't say, have a school, because they will always say something from a leg. They will always say it's good and they run off to their room.

But ask them what made you laugh today? A smile today or what was your highlight of history class? Or when your colleagues ask, come back on a Monday morning, don't ask how was the weekend, but ask something that changes really the script in that regard. Try it out and that's just one of the strategies that I'm using, but maybe that could kind of shift.

the way we're looking at ourselves? Are we allowing ourselves to ask that question? And also, do we improve our relationship because of it?

Garrick (45:18.049)
Thank you, Stefan. Stefan von Heudank, change your script, he says. This series is about how individuals and organizations use the power of curiosity to drive success in their lives and businesses, especially in the context of our new digital reality. It brings to life the latest understandings from neuroscience, anthropology, history, business, science, and behaviorism. But curiosity makes these useful for everyone. We're curious to hear from you.

If you think there was something useful or valuable from this conversation, we encourage you to write a review for the podcast on your preferred channel saying why this was so and what have you learned from it. We always appreciate hearing your listeners thoughts and having a curious conversation. Join today at hashtag curious advantage. The book is available on Amazon and great book shops near you. Order your physical, digital or audio book to further explore the seven seas model for being more curious. Subscribe today and keep exploring curiously.