Simon Brown (00:02.342)
Hello and welcome to this episode of the Curious Advantage podcast. My name is Simon Brown. I'm one of the co-authors of the book, The Curious Advantage. And today I'm here with my co-author, Garrick Jones. Hi, Garrick. Paul can't be with us today, but we're delighted to be joined by Shannon Minifie CEO at Box of Crayons. Welcome, Shannon.

Garrick (00:15.134)
Hi everybody.

Shannon Minifie (00:24.747)
Hi Simon, hi Garrick, thanks for having me.

Simon Brown (00:27.436)
It's great to have you. So maybe to kick us off Shannon, can you share a little bit about your journey? So maybe tease us with a little bit of the research that we're to come on and talk about and how curiosity and a passion for meaningful conversations have shaped the path that you've taken.

Shannon Minifie (00:43.993)
Sure, yeah, I can. I wish that the answer was as intentional as that, that I've just followed a path and passion for meaningful conversations, but the path is a little less straight than that. So I started working with Box of Crayons with the founder of Box of Crayons, Michael Bungay Stanier, about 10 years ago. I joined in a very part time role doing book publicity, actually. So I was

Simon Brown (00:52.464)
Hahaha.

Shannon Minifie (01:08.653)
helping to make my mortgage, toiling away at finishing a dissertation on contemporary American fiction, of all things. So I went on to finish that in 2019. But when I first started working at Box of Crayons, it was 2016, and Michael Bungay-Stanier had just finished and was about to launch a book called The Coaching Habit. And this book has gone on to sell more than a million and a half copies. I know you've had Michael on the show maybe more than once.

But in 2016, the phone kind of started ringing off the hook. So organizations started calling us wanting to figure out like, how do we operationalize this idea of coach-like curiosity in the book? And the company started to change fast. And amidst the sort of frenzy of inquiries and program deliveries, I was very much to my disdain asked to do sales. And I immediately said like,

No way, as I'm not getting thrown into some death of a salesman situation. I'd read Arthur Miller and David Mamet, and that wasn't me. But Michael's like, no, you'll be great. And you can get expert in anything, and we'll do a disk assessment. Anyway, before I knew it, I was sort of Willy Lomond into going on to sales calls. And now I was suddenly in this position. And here's this comes back to conversations. I was suddenly in this position of doing a very consultative sale, of having to advise our clients on how to solve their problems.

Simon Brown (02:01.848)
Thank you.

Shannon Minifie (02:30.701)
and I was completely brand new to learning and development. I'd never heard the phrase high potential. I'd never seen a leader competency framework. I hadn't even worked in a big organization, right? Like I worked in a part of university faculty and small publishing houses. So all of the layers of politics and culture, I didn't know anything about it. But it worked out. I...

In the end, kind of realized that my proficiency as a salesperson, and I think to my surprise, and maybe to Michael's and others, I became quite proficient and it had nothing to do with sort of deep expertise or deep knowledge that I already had, but in the ability to have conversations with our clients. So when I look back, the skill that kind of led to my success and to keeping down this path was sort of combination of enthusiastic commitment to learning.

and digging into questions. And also what I would now call relational curiosity. So we can get into what that means in a little bit, but I'll say now that the kinds of questions that I asked, they really created a space that could develop this relationship with them. Yeah, Garek.

Garrick (03:35.266)
This please.

Garrick (03:43.724)
I'm really about relational curiosity, of course, but before that, do box of cranes evolve from coaching skills, which is where to focusing on curiosity? That's an interesting leap.

Shannon Minifie (03:55.405)
Yeah, yeah, it is. It is an interesting leap. So when I took over the role of CEO in 2019, our kind of mission then was really coaching in 10 minutes or less. So coaching was the focus. But I wanted to build a sort of foundation upon which we could develop more offerings over time in a cohesive way. But whatever we came up with as a sort of new umbrella idea, a new foundation had to fit what we were already doing into it already.

So we hired a CMO and we did a bunch of positioning work. And we're like, what direction could we go? Do we double down on habits? Is coaching the thing? And curiosity was one of the options. And one of the questions that the consultant asked us was she was like, is this something you can be excited about for five or 10 years at least, right? And I knew that there was something I could be excited about. And so, you know, like...

Pretty quickly, I was like, oh, now I have to become an expert in curiosity more broadly. And so I started going down this rabbit hole of learning more about curiosity and how it's defined and how people think about it. And that kind of led to this aha moment of realizing that the form of curiosity we were teaching in the coaching habit wasn't exactly the same as the kind of curiosity most of the business literature and a lot of the scientific literature refers to.

And so that kind of became the beginning of realizing that we had a definitional opportunity to kind of have a spiky point of view around curiosity and a form of curiosity in the workplace. Garek, you look like, yeah.

Garrick (05:26.946)
This is a huge sort of insight into curiosity, which I think it's exploring. Because you talk about there's the academic curiosity and a lot of work has been done on what that means psychologically and neuropsychologically and so on. But you talk about a different kind of curiosity that is only now becoming more formalized and understood and useful. And I imagine that's what you call relational curiosity.

Shannon Minifie (05:56.353)
That's right. it was something that, you're right, only kind of showed up occasionally on the fringes of the business and scientific literature. So like, since my original exploration, like maybe six years ago, I think like Scott Shigoka in his book, Seek, is really talking about a form of relational curiosity. The siblings, Aller, Zern, and Bissett, talk about curiosity as edge work between people and not just between an individual and an idea.

Garrick (06:16.248)
Yeah.

Shannon Minifie (06:25.143)
And I think that they're getting at it. And like it's obliquely referenced, but then quickly moved on from. But it's, is, it's a different, the moment for me, Garrick, was really like, I was like, I learned that curiosity means to care. And I was like, well, to care, like I have a hard time connecting that like route with the desire to learn something, right? Like it fits, but not exactly. And I found myself thinking like care in what way?

care about learning new things, care about finding answers, but care kind of bent in what direction or for whom. And so I had this realization that the more intellectual curiosity, that's we kind of refer to InfoGap curiosity as a shorthand. It was kind of reflexive. Like the care bends back on the curious person. They satiate their own desire to learn. And there's good outcomes for everyone, but.

Like that's the motivating desire. It's almost selfish in a good way. Whereas there's a kind of curiosity that's outward. Yeah. Yeah.

Garrick (07:26.146)
Yeah. And so if it's about care and about the self and what I'm passionate about or what I want to know about and self care, I imagine, how does that relate to why it's critical in building trust and collaboration that you talk about?

Shannon Minifie (07:41.751)
Yeah, well, I think when people in building trust, so when people feel like others are creating space for them to be heard, when people feel like they're trying to be seen, like it's a beautiful thing to feel seen. It's a really good gift to be able to make people feel seen. Right. When you feel like your point of view counts for something.

when you feel like your leader and your colleagues have some degree of humility that they're going to incorporate what you think into the solution. Like all of those kinds of things help you understand each other and develop a bit of empathy for each other so that when times get tough, you kind of, already have a relationship with the person behind the conflict or behind the words, right? So I think it's all of those kinds of things. Like it's that work you have to put in, like an insurance ahead of time so you can pay it out when.

things get hard.

Simon Brown (08:40.348)
So that relational curiosity is part of that interest in other people, that curiosity about others. I know there's also research from Harvard around some of the benefits of curiosity around improved team effectiveness and communication from being curious what other people say, being more attentive, breaking down conflict in teams around what we talk about as being curious, not furious.

So yeah, you want to understand other people's points of view, other people's opinions, why they hold those opinions. That's the relational curiosity piece.

Shannon Minifie (09:11.193)
That's different.

Shannon Minifie (09:20.781)
That's part of it, I mean, that's an important part of it, is like a real desire to understand, not just in the service of like putting together your counter thesis or listening for the moment that you can dispute the other side, right? But it's also even more, there's even less of yourself in this form of curiosity. And what I mean by that is,

When you're exploring, when you're being intellectually curious, even if it's really just to understand a view you don't agree with or don't hold, you're still seeking to know something yourself, to understand something yourself. And I think with relational curiosity, and this is why it's a critical coaching skill, the person asking questions doesn't actually think that they need to know or in any way already possess the answer, but that the role is purely facilitative. So the questions that you ask,

What you want the other person to know is that you think they've got this. Like they have the skill and the experience to get there and you're just gonna help them think of, you're gonna help them reframe the challenge, but you're not, you don't know what it is. You don't presume to know what it is. You're not leading the conversation in any way. It's a fully support. Does that make sense? Like there's even less of your own interest in it than even that form of curiosity, which is super important too.

Simon Brown (10:34.801)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Garrick (10:43.79)
This really pings me. This really talks to me about the idea of leadership in the new world and in everything we're inhabiting right now. And we know that leadership is changing. We often talk about the shift in the pyramid, how the pyramid has broken down. We now have a hyperlinked situation where everybody at any level within a system

can know infinite amount of information. And those, how do you lead that cloud of relationships? And more and more we finding people talking to us about curious leadership and referring to some of the work we do within the curious leadership and creating that as a skill, you're becoming a curious leader who's deploying curious leadership skills. And what you're talking to me is about...

Shannon Minifie (11:13.699)
Thank

Shannon Minifie (11:26.051)
Mm-hmm.

Garrick (11:36.276)
These are habits and coaching skills that I can use as a leader with a team and asking questions in particular way, exploring and being curious in a particular way that help me be a better leader in this new space. But how do I get out of that cycle of feeling responsible for controlling outcomes in this sort of old style leadership?

Shannon Minifie (11:59.437)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. How do you get to ask? So first of all, I think I agree with you completely. And we're working with a big tech company right now where their main goal with working with us is to have leaders understand that leadership is about asking questions, right? So, but how you ask questions and the questions you ask matters too, right? So signaling that slowing down enough to figure out the problem and ask questions and not having the answers, that's all important. But thinking about

like what gets in the way. So how do we have people shift their mindset to, I'm not just gonna dig into the data or go find the answer, but I'm gonna facilitate conversation. I'm gonna, so like picture a disagreement between team members. So this relationally curious leader is someone that isn't necessarily gonna jump in to fix or take sides, but to ask questions to reveal what's kind of going on beneath the surface. So the thing that kind of gets in the way of that, that we talk about is the advice monster habit.

the advice monster habit. Yeah. The advice monster. So.

Garrick (12:57.666)
The Advice Monster.

Simon Brown (13:01.242)
which was another of Michael's books, think, wasn't it, the advice?

Garrick (13:03.786)
Yeah.

Shannon Minifie (13:05.207)
Yeah, taming the advice monster. yeah, so this is what we call the advice monster habit. This is the thing that looms really large. It takes multiple forms. It's been reinforced in multiple ways in all of our lives in the decades that have sort of led to our professional existences. And now it's just become a kind of default way of responding to asks for help to problems that arise, right? We think we need to solve and we need to solve quickly and we're usually loathe to sort of pause and

admit that the answer might not be whatever I'm assuming it is, but could be on the other side of asking this group of people a couple more questions. So this isn't some kind of dark inclination. It's just a behavior that's reinforced culturally in our organizations and our societies. And we kind of break it down into three different forms. So we've got the tell-it advice monster, which is really about, it's like the loudest and most obvious of the advice monsters.

It's showing people you have the answer. It's, know, if you don't have the answer, you failed in your job. It's wanting to look smart. The save it is, you know, this idea that you got to hold it all together. This is like a rescuer tendency, right? And your job is to be fully responsible, right? So back to, you know, Garik, this idea of how do you get people to move away from not wanting to control the outcome? Save it's really want to control the outcome. And so to control it's, which is a even subtler version of that advice monster, which is

Garrick (14:27.021)
Yeah.

Shannon Minifie (14:34.947)
you know, I'm gonna just guide the conversation away from this idea, cause I don't like it. And after a while people start to like, they get it. They see how this shows up and they can predict how things are gonna go. And it's demoralizing, yeah.

Simon Brown (14:51.9)
So these are, I guess, human insecurities or habits, I guess, that we have of, if you seem to be in a leadership position, then...

one's own self-perception, I need to know the answer. I have to say this is how it is. Or yeah, it's going wrong. It's on me. I need to save it. yeah, if I'm not in control of it, then am I really leading? I guess that's the sort of shift to the, if you like, sort of new leadership style of it's okay to not know the answer and it's okay sometimes that things don't work out. You don't have to save everything and make every project a success because yeah, that's not possible.

It's thoroughly in the world today and certain things can't be controlled.

Shannon Minifie (15:36.545)
No, yeah, exactly. you can't like understanding that you are responsible for the outcomes of your team, but that you don't do the work yourself, you lead the work. Like that's that's that distinction, right? So how can you influence and how can you support the team that produces that outcome? Is that kind of shifts? What does it look like when you're leading the team and by asking questions and empowering people and building?

learning and building capability as opposed to doing things for other people.

Garrick (16:10.264)
And of course, the obvious question is, why is it more powerful as a curious leader to ask more questions than to be responsible for the outcomes? What is the impact of that on people? And why does the new scenario demand it? What's causing this change?

Shannon Minifie (16:23.224)
Yeah.

Shannon Minifie (16:30.029)
Yeah, think, well, I think it's more powerful because I don't know how you succession plan and you build a bench of ready leaders and how you build capability and knowledge in your team when you jump in and do things for other people, right? It just short circuits other people's learning and growth and development. So it just kind of is unsustainable. I think it's more important than ever because people have a, so I'm 42.

but people my age and a bit younger have a real point of view about where they want to spend their work life. More so than like I did a few years ago and then my parents certainly did, right? So people want to work at organizations that feel aligned to their values, that make them feel seen, that make them feel like they have the opportunity to reach their potential or they're going to go somewhere else, right? So like most organizations we work with are really committed to creating a culture of

of curiosity, not just because it produces better results, which they believe that it does. part of that is because they have the best talent. They have people that come to the organization, are engaged and want to stay because they trust and they care about the people that they're working with. And they want to work through all of the various kinds of disruption that's showing up today. I don't know. I'm curious, Simon and Garak, what else you would add to that?

in terms of why this matters right now is a style of leadership.

Simon Brown (17:57.264)
Yeah, mean, my take is we're going into sort of uncharted territory with what's happening with AI. We cannot know the answer of exactly how it's going to play out. There are incredibly bright people who have totally opposing views on how it's going to play through and with very good justification on why it's going to go one way or the other. And so as a leader, it's navigating through this

Shannon Minifie (18:04.857)
Mm-hmm.

Simon Brown (18:27.198)
unknown. We recently had Bob Johansen talking around the banny world of brutal, anxious, non-linear.

incomprehensible. so yeah, how do you manage through that? And yeah, the answer was this curiosity is asking questions, it's experimenting, it's creating the safety to hear lots of different opinions, it's holding paradoxes, it's all of these elements. And so yeah, that culture of curiosity, for me, is almost the only way you can navigate through that. If you go into it with those advice monster traits of, know the answer, I'm trying to control this, I'm clear, this is exactly what's going to play out.

Shannon Minifie (18:54.317)
Yeah.

Shannon Minifie (19:06.915)
Yeah.

Simon Brown (19:07.327)
Delusional!

Garrick (19:09.112)
Yeah.

Shannon Minifie (19:09.464)
Yeah.

Garrick (19:10.264)
We've learned that the future is unpredictable and cannot be predicted. And more and more we are aware of that. And we also are aware that the future that is coming is already here. It's just unevenly distributed. So the only way we find these things is by asking questions. And there's no one person who can find the answer. We need to work with as many people in our network or people we're connected to and connected to that context to be able to raise these ideas, being curious.

is the thing, as Simon was saying, that keeps us at a point where we can ask the questions that are needed to bring those answers to us. And no one has the answer. We all have to live in the present and we all have to learn together. But it's that thing of we all have to learn together, let's be open about that and let's do it together.

Shannon Minifie (19:51.48)
Yeah.

Shannon Minifie (20:03.897)
Right. And the other thing I would add to, specifically around relational curiosity, so we kind of, this question, Garrick of why does this seem important right now? We sought to answer that question to kind of validate our hypothesis that curiosity is needed in organizations last year. we, like Simon mentioned, we engaged the Harris Poll last year. So we had this moment.

So Box of Crayons, we're like, we're all in on curiosity. This is our mission to unleash the power of curiosity. We want to teach curiosity skills. For two decades, we've been doing this. We've got 150,000 participants that are telling us it's created value for them and their organizations. But we didn't have research on the value of curiosity in the workplace and the place of this sort of lesser known kind of relational curiosity. So we found ourselves asking exactly these kinds of questions like,

Does curiosity help? Is it a skill that leaders connect to business outcomes? How important is developing this skill in big organizations amidst all the other kinds of disruption that is going on? And we knew that the answer could be, like, it's not. It's not important. No one cares. And we would have a pretty big business problem, but it was like, it's better to know now and like change direction, right?

Simon Brown (21:16.407)
Thank

Shannon Minifie (21:24.983)
So that was kind of the risk, but so we played it straight and we partnered with the Harris Poll to sort of to dig into what are the challenges that organizations are facing right now and how does curiosity fit into that if at all. And the findings uncovered some pretty like heart wrenching really challenges that organizations are facing. It also validated this distinction between intellectual and relational curiosity, which we set up in the survey. And it also

revealed leaders and knowledge workers. So we surveyed 500 leaders and a thousand knowledge workers in US big organizations. And they all agreed that while intellectual curiosity is privileged and the only kind that's promoted in the workplace, 76 % of people said that, relational curiosity, so curiosity for each other was gonna be really urgently needed in the future.

to get outside of assumptions and to counter a lot of the challenges that we saw, which we kind of saw a few themes of challenges, certain things stood out more than others.

Simon Brown (22:32.07)
So we're going to dive into that in a moment, but maybe let me a little bit more of your background first of all. So Shannon began her career in academia and was driven by passion as we heard earlier for meaningful conversations. And then 2016 pivoted into the corporate learning and development world.

Shannon Minifie (22:34.457)
So.

Simon Brown (22:49.148)
bringing over a decade of experience in education and analytical inquiry, and then as CEO of Box of Crayons, and now fosters a culture of curious deep thinking. She completed her PhD in English in 2019, and while literature remains her favorite hobby, she's found these new professional conversations that fuel her work today. So let's dive into that research that you undertook with the Harris Poll. So 500 leaders, 1,000 knowledge workers, and I guess what was the,

was the core finding in terms of is, you took the risk, is curiosity valuable for business impact? That was I guess the ultimate question.

Shannon Minifie (23:30.673)
That was the ultimate question. we did find that, well, 76 % of leaders and knowledge workers said that intellectual curiosity is the only kind that's promoted in the workplace. Relational curiosity would actually help to amplify positive workplace behaviors like collaboration, communication, empathy, all of the things that were really

at the root of the challenges that we saw. So let me talk about the challenges first, because they go together, right? The challenges we saw have issues that are better addressed by things other than intellectual curiosity, right? So the first kind of finding, first theme, was the pervasiveness of fear. And this was kind of one of the most disturbing and prevalent findings. We were all kind of taken aback by how destructive the fear of making mistakes is.

in the research. So it showed really that it's a rampant and invisible force that's really destabilizing work and working relationships. So, you know, burnout, disengagement, quiet quitting, like all these kinds of things have been headlines since the pandemic, but really what we saw was a common cause behind all of that, which is fear. So it breeds doubt, it breeds anxiety, it breeds blame, all that kind of stuff. Withdrawal, overwhelm, distrust.

And the cost for that, turns out from the researcher, are high both for humans and businesses. So the knowledge workers cited spending almost six hours a week fearing making a mistake. So that's almost a whole work day for some people, right? So that shows up in behaviors like redoing or rereading tasks that they're confident are correct, rereading communications from your colleagues or your boss.

Garrick (25:12.268)
Mm.

Shannon Minifie (25:20.089)
This amounted, this kind of stalling behavior out of fear amounted to 14 and a half percent of the workweek. So for an organization that's a thousand people, that's 6,000 hours or seven and a half million dollars annually, right? So if you're a bigger organization than a million people, math isn't my strong suit, but it's more than that. And there's a psychological impact, right? So it's expensive for businesses and there's a psychological impact. So employees, like they procrastinate because they fear negative outcomes.

That contributed to nearly nine hours of time workers reported that they spend just trying to motivate themselves to be productive. It leads to a kind of cognitive paralysis. So employees feel frozen, they feel overwhelmed, they're unable to make decisions. And we saw that in the data as workers reported spending about five hours a week stuck on problems. Stuck on problems where they're not just reaching out for help.

Garrick (25:56.846)
Hmm.

Shannon Minifie (26:13.847)
Right? So it's that withdrawing in that fear of asking for help, that fear of saying, I don't get it. Right? And just thinking about everything that's lost in those hours, like the work not completed, great ideas not developed, collaboration avoided, learning and growth not pursued. So that was the fear theme that we kind of saw as the umbrella of all of that kind of data.

Simon Brown (26:40.24)
Did you go into how to overcome that fear as well? So I would have some thoughts, but it didn't come out of the research of how best to overcome that fear, paralyzing fear and that sort of wasted time and emotional and human cost of that fear.

Shannon Minifie (26:59.713)
Yeah, they didn't answer the question exactly of which things to overcome that fear. But in talking about how, like what, what could be the way out leaders and knowledge workers alike agreed that relational curiosity. So a form of relating to others to develop trust, to develop relationship would help to positively change a lot of the things underneath that kind of fear.

So like that collaboration and that empathy. So they saw that as really a foundational or an amplifier, a power skill that could help to positively impact all of those different areas that would probably help people to avoid fear.

Simon Brown (27:48.102)
And as a leader then, demonstrating that relational curiosity comes back to asking questions, showing genuine interest in others' points of view, not letting the advice monster traits show up. Those are the types of things, creating that psychological safety, I guess.

Shannon Minifie (28:07.041)
Yeah!

I was just going to say, yeah, creating psychological safety is a big part of it. Yeah.

Simon Brown (28:14.3)
Yeah. Cool.

Shannon Minifie (28:16.013)
And we talk about doing that, but it's how do you do it, right? Sorry, Garak, it looks like you're gonna say something.

Garrick (28:19.246)
How do you do it? How do you create an atmosphere of psychological safety through question, asking the right questions, which even as a leader, you keep an eye on what you're trying to achieve and what the outcome is, but at the same time, allowing people the power to figure it out for themselves and answer questions themselves and be curious themselves. It's not an easy task, especially when we've been

Shannon Minifie (28:41.699)
Mm-hmm.

Garrick (28:47.17)
brought up, know, that the leader knows best and you have to undo that learning and start again. But it definitely gets results. I'm curious about your literature degree, I may go there. Not specifically, because I mean, it's fascinating. And I always think that.

Shannon Minifie (29:02.691)
Yeah.

Garrick (29:08.654)
any broad degree outside of business is way more valuable because you can always learn business later. But the kind of huge amounts of context and brilliant stuff that people get from the arts and from literature and from, you know, maths and science and all the other stuff that's not business, I think is a great starting point.

Shannon Minifie (29:15.672)
Ha!

Shannon Minifie (29:26.243)
Mm-hmm.

Garrick (29:28.248)
Can I ask a question? If you think back on your literature and what you love about literature, how has that informed your views on curiosity and what may be useful and how we overcome things we need to overcome? Has it been useful?

Shannon Minifie (29:42.605)
Yeah, yeah, Yeah, I think it's natural in retrospect that I'm drawn to this form of curiosity that's really about creating a space into which I'm inviting you to try to understand you.

to help you feel seen. There's a way in which, like that's what literature does too, right? It creates this sort of fictive space in which we're granted imaginative access to other selves, right? So like reading a book is a way of like witnessing another person's experience in the same way that it can be and having a conversation where someone shares that experience. And I think one of the things that I find fascinating is that there is, we have a lot of empathy.

Garrick (30:08.79)
Mm-hmm.

Shannon Minifie (30:25.589)
for characters during the reading experience, characters that we disagree with, whose actions we think are nefarious and whose beliefs we don't hold as our own. But it's really the power of focalization or perspective really that does it. So the ability to see through those characters' eyes helps us to...

to have an understanding and an empathy for them that we might not otherwise have. And I've always thought it was interesting that we're able to do that when reading or engaging with other kinds of narrative realism. We have such a hard time doing that with real humans. There's a scientific term for it, or a psychological term now that I don't have committed to memory, but this idea that we are so complex, but other people are very simple, right?

Garrick (31:14.334)
Yeah.

Shannon Minifie (31:16.705)
And one of the really instructive things about reading good literature is that as you're encountering other characters' complexity, you're in conversation with yourself and the complexity of yourself and how weird we are. And we're better at doing that with fictional characters and with real people.

Garrick (31:24.013)
Yeah.

Garrick (31:29.762)
Yes.

Garrick (31:34.37)
That's right. And yet with real people, we're still making up a fiction. mean, creating the fiction of the reality constantly. And I love that you're living another life through through the fiction and getting awareness of others and empathy.

Shannon Minifie (31:38.551)
Sure, yeah.

Yep. Yep.

Garrick (31:51.348)
absolutely really really makes me think about that you you mentioned willy loman from death of a salesman earlier i must go back to willy loman is this kind of amazing hero anti-hero and the thing i always remember about willy loman even though he gets a bad rap always sort of

Shannon Minifie (31:57.251)
Right?

Garrick (32:10.168)
thought to be quite sad in some way. Willie was out in the world and he had huge amounts of experiences and those kinds of experiences disassociated him from the family back at home in some way and he was this kind of character that would come back and drop into their lives every...

now and then and bring them gifts from far away places and things and bring things that you know you connected them to a whole other world that only sort of fueled their curiosity in some way but it was Willy's being out in the world that gave them life in some strange way. What do you think?

Shannon Minifie (32:51.031)
I mean, I think it's been a while since I've read it, but what the things that kind of different things have lingered for me. So I've thought a little bit about like, he's such a pitiful character and his desire to like to have like to just be more dignified and to have dignity in his work. There's an interesting, he could do like interesting reading of like his sort of masculine desire to.

Garrick (33:09.922)
Yeah.

Shannon Minifie (33:17.773)
to provide for the family and that that's gonna bring dignity for him. So yeah, it's just interesting the things that I like remember from that character versus your reading of it, Karik. That subjectivity is important too. So overcoming that kind of subjectivity is one of the things for curiosity and literature, I think. Yeah. Yeah.

Garrick (33:26.434)
Yeah. But, but... Exactly!

Garrick (33:36.3)
and it informs us and fuels our desires to know more and be curious. What are some of the risks, do you think, that we have as leaders? Here's what I really want to say. I really think as leaders that we get...

a lot of value out of looking beyond just the workplace and we get a lot of value of being able to bring metaphors and narrative and stories from elsewhere. Even from the arts and literature, but also of course from business books and so on. But by going beyond where we just are and finding things we enrich everything we're involved in and that...

Shannon Minifie (34:09.699)
Mm-hmm.

Garrick (34:24.45)
feels everybody just the way that literature feels us. It's all about narrative at the end of the day. The narratives we construct for ourselves, the narratives we construct for our teams and our viewers on the world.

Shannon Minifie (34:27.64)
Mm-hmm.

Shannon Minifie (34:37.313)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. And yeah, and the active kind of meaning making that's happening when you're doing that. And just making connection. I had a prof that once said something like, real intelligence is the ability to make connections, to see one thing in another thing. And I think that's kind of part of what you're describing, right? Because part of what you want it, if you want to make something powerful for somebody, for your team, for example,

Garrick (34:44.557)
Yes.

Garrick (35:07.064)
Yes.

Shannon Minifie (35:07.107)
You've got to keep going until you find the thing that they want to enlist to, right? The thing that grabs them and that they care about. Maybe it's that aspect of Willy Loman that stuck with you and it's some other aspect of him that stuck with me.

Garrick (35:22.19)
And here's the thing, you know, we are meaning making machines in some respects, you know, we're always searching for meaning and glom onto the things that give us the most meaning and drive. And for our teams, if we're constructing a narrative, the narratives we choose could be delusional, but we also want them to be located in reality. So the questions we ask.

Shannon Minifie (35:44.377)
Yeah.

Garrick (35:46.07)
and how we interrogate the reality and the context that others have has a huge impact on the reality that we define for ourselves as a group, I imagine.

Simon Brown (35:57.178)
that was an element of the culture of curiosity in my previous organization was around how can you take patterns or things from other walks of life and bring those in. And often the sort of breakthroughs came from seeing a piece of art or a piece of statue or whatever and suddenly things clicked. And it's like, if I bring that back into what I'm doing here. And that was the sort of breakthrough that we're looking at. And the whole sort of physical environment was around design.

Shannon Minifie (36:20.569)
Yeah.

Simon Brown (36:27.283)
around that giving that inspiration and those maybe triggers that created the curiosity and the breakthroughs.

Shannon Minifie (36:31.192)
Yeah.

Yeah, I think that like what you just said about inspiration is important. curiosity is sparked by something, it's inspired by something. I think like we've all gone through periods where you just kind of feel like not that curious. Like maybe you haven't read something good in a while. That's the thing for me. Like if I've been too busy to read, so I'll have a book on the go. But it's sparked by something and it gets, it's an active state.

in that way. But you can be sparked by seeing something or being inspired by something that wants you to go over here and dive deeper. You can also just be inspired by wanting to make some someone's life better or someone's help someone understand something.

Simon Brown (37:17.628)
and how...

from your experience or from the research that you'd have, how can leaders help to, I guess, foster that environment of curiosity within their teams, creating an environment that people can practice that relational curiosity? If it's 76 % of people see the intellectual curiosity, but they're not seeing that relational curiosity, what can be the inspiration? So for people listening now, what should they go and do differently when they go into work tomorrow?

yeah what can they do what are the tips

Shannon Minifie (37:51.992)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I wish that the research had also been, what will we go do next? But that is the work that we do. So the outcomes of that work comes from the organizations that we work with. But I was happy to validate that there's these two distinctions and yes, this kind is going to help us get better at all these other things. So what are the practical things we can do? Well, we talked a little bit about the way in which creating psychological safety is one of the critical things underneath

the fear and I didn't even get into the discord and disconnection, but all of that is there too, right? Like people just can't deal with each other, don't wanna listen to each other, can't accept feedback, all that kind of stuff. And time wasted on this decoding communications I talked about, this is all about fear of making a mistake. So things you can do are like create a culture of open communication. So really practically speaking, do you create space for others to contribute? So.

Are you the person talking the most in all of your meetings? Are you leading the way all of the time? Are you filling the space with advice and direction? Or are you putting yourself on mute sometimes and letting other people go first? Are you asking questions that help you all stay curious together in that way? We worked with a healthcare network in Pennsylvania where the sort of apocryphal story was that the president

came into her all hands meeting and she said, we are going to use these seven essential questions the entire time. And she just laid the card down and she's like, these are the questions we will ask. This is what's guiding the meeting. And as a sort of symbolic thing. that is also important. Like how do you role model that and put yourself out there? I think that part of that is also being vulnerable. showing.

that you don't know and you don't have all the answers. And that's part of refusing to rush in with answers, which is quite a vulnerable thing to do as a leader, to sit there in that quiet and in those questions where you feel the pressure to solve. Also admitting to mistakes and sharing your learning from that is important to create that kind of culture of continuous learning and also of just the safety of being able to make mistakes.

Simon Brown (40:12.604)
Plenty there, yes. So yeah, lots that we can take away. And it's, I guess, easier, many of those, to listen to and to take in rather than to actually put in to practice day to day.

Shannon Minifie (40:13.971)
Yeah, there's some. Yeah.

Shannon Minifie (40:28.695)
Yeah, but it starts with recognizing, hey, here's a moment where I feel like I want to tell someone what to do. And instead of doing that, I'm going to ask them a question that helps, that gives the challenge they brought to me the space to breathe, kind of, as opposed to kind of trying to rush through it and get to that answer. I'm going to validate their experience and ask them some questions. But it starts in those little moments.

Simon Brown (40:58.416)
So we're coming towards the end, but maybe what are you personally curious about at the moment?

Shannon Minifie (41:04.6)
What am I personally curious about at the moment? I am personally curious about how, I'm curious about how my kids are growing up, about the people they are and they'll be the kind of the role that they'll play in the world, what the world will look like for them in 10 and 20 years and when I'm gone. I know I can't figure out whether like, it's good that a-

Simon Brown (41:26.428)
us.

Shannon Minifie (41:30.105)
AI is happening now so that by the time they're ready, they're going to work, things will be entrenched. I wish I was a little older now. I'm curious about how AI is going to shape, is reshaping the learning landscape, both corporate learning and education more broadly. Garak, you wanted to.

Simon Brown (41:39.18)
Hahaha.

Garrick (41:51.022)
Well, we've been talking about questions and how questioning is the answer in so many ways. There's so many downsides everyone talks about on the AI front. at the same time, if there's one thing it's doing to all of us, it's asking us to ask better questions.

and you only get great results out of an AI interaction if you put great questions into it and frame those questions with prompts in a way that you really have to think about and you have to think about language. And I'm sure that's going to have an impact. I'm sure it is.

Shannon Minifie (42:28.011)
Yeah, mean, yeah, I let's start with the positives. Yes, agree with you. I'm excited. Like we largely partner with L and D HR talent teams, right? Sometimes enablement. And I'm curious about and I think that there are great wins for those teams and those functions in terms of Gen AI backed publishing systems, things like Josh Burson's like his Galileo, Galileo, other dynamic aggregators.

Garrick (42:32.278)
Yes.

Shannon Minifie (42:54.701)
publishers of content that's personalized ways to find and address skill gaps. I'm also wary of the conflation of making content available and successful learning, which are two different things, right? So I'm curious about the way in which, yes, using AI assistance, right? And you've probably both seen the MIT, the recent MIT study.

about using AI assistance and comparing the two different groups, right? What are we, the cognitive offloading that they describe, so what are we offloading, right? And we know that good learning, successful learning is effortful. It takes some effort to get there. And so I think we're now starting to get to the point of like, is it better to brainstorm with the AI or is it better to do the hard work of framing the question?

Garrick (43:33.848)
Hmm.

Garrick (43:40.27)
Hmm.

Shannon Minifie (43:53.837)
better by yourself? Like where, what has more detriment? But where were you seeing it in the process is starting to be looked at more carefully? Yeah, Garrett.

Garrick (43:59.725)
This.

Garrick (44:03.512)
That's right, those neuroscientific, those neuropsychological links have got to be made somewhere in the process. We've got to do that work somewhere.

Shannon Minifie (44:09.739)
Yeah. Yeah. And just in terms of like the curiosity about AI, like I think that people are very curious about what are its applications, what are the other ways I can use it, all that kind of stuff. And I think it probably behooves us to be curious about, to keep asking the question of like, what problems are we solving? Because when I hear people like Elon Musk talk about this sort of like utopia where no one will have to work.

I don't know that that's a good, like I think that human, back to Willy Loman, right? Like I think work is like dignified and it is human. And I think, like if you think about like social media, something has to be replaced in order for something else to be successful. And if we had said, in order for social media to succeed, we need people, we need kids alone with their devices. Would we have chosen that contingency?

And so I'm just like, what do we need to replace? What are we doing this for? What problems are we solving? And I think that's a really interesting place for learning. Because one of the problems that we have, that our clients have, is how to scale really believable, immersive practice that accomplishes the kind of narrative realism, which is similar to the kind in fictional realism too, right? This like...

Simon Brown (45:09.82)
you

Shannon Minifie (45:37.859)
verisimilitude and artifice all at the same time. And then have that repeated practice spaced over time. And so a Gen. AI backed avatar based simulation is the thing that we're working on that I think solves a really concrete problem for learning and it would be good.

Garrick (45:57.868)
Do have a favourite literature book that you'd recommend?

Shannon Minifie (46:00.893)
That is my closing question. My favourite literature book. Yeah, I mean, I have a lot of favourite books. I'll plug a book I just finished last week, which is fantastic. And since we're kind of talking about what will the future hold, it's called The Beasting by Paul Murray. He's an Irish writer that looks at sort of post-Crash Ireland, the ecological demise of the world.

Garrick (46:02.58)
Yeah.

Shannon Minifie (46:28.739)
for this one family, the economical demise and their relationships sort of as things unravel. Your son's reading that right now? It's fantastic. It's really good.

Garrick (46:36.898)
on my summary reading list right now.

Simon Brown (46:42.844)
add that to my list. Cool. So I'll come to you for a closing thought in a moment, but maybe just to summarize some of the things we covered. So we heard about your journey at Boxer Preyons working with Michael Bumgay-Stanier and the success of the coaching habit with his million seller. Went on to the how sort of coaching likens to curiosity. Went into your journey in sales and the links with the Woolly Loman book, how you moved into L &D and then got curious about curiosity and

study with relational curiosity and moving from sort of coaching in 10 minutes or less through to actually this focus around curiosity being the thing to focus about, the thing that would get you excited for the next five to ten years.

Then some of the elements around relational curiosity, around sort of care, this desire to learn, the self element, this trust and collaboration, this seeing people and how it differs from intellectual curiosity or for information gap curiosity. Went into some of the forms of the advice monster. the tell it, the save it, the control it and these things that we're battling against.

that can hold us back there, talk around some of the things to build a culture of curiosity, talk about the value that it can bring and the business impact from the 500 leaders, thousand knowledge workers, we heard 76 % of people see the value of relationship curiosity, if I get that right.

and the focus more now on intellectual with the value that relational curiosity could bring. And then, into some of the things that a leader can practically do. So creating psychological safety, creating a space for others to contribute, that sort of role modelling, people being vulnerable, admitting to mistakes, those are some of the practical things that we put in. And then some of the things that you're currently curious about, where might things go with AI, what might the world look like?

Simon Brown (48:47.862)
So a lot we covered. If there was one thing from all of that or one takeaway for our listeners, what would that be?

Shannon Minifie (48:52.185)
One takeaway. think the one easy takeaway is that there is this other form of curiosity that is more relational. So it's motivated by something a bit different. And so the outcomes are different and the way that it's practiced looks a little bit different. And just knowing that, and there's more detail in the white paper around.

what people thought about relational curiosity and the problems that it solves, but just knowing that it is a form of curiosity that people think should be practiced in the workplace and could help to overcome fear and discord and disconnect and all of the things that are gonna get in the way of actually practicing intellectual curiosity, right? And of organizations being successful, right? Organizations only work if people work. They have to do the work together. So, yeah.

I think just walking away with that distinction is key.

Simon Brown (49:47.868)
And is the white paper publicly available if people want access? that? Yep.

Shannon Minifie (49:51.413)
It is, yeah. So we can link that for, or you can provide it however you want. Yeah, absolutely. Great. Yeah.

Simon Brown (49:54.672)
Yep. That'll be great. We'll in the show notes. That'll be great. Very good. So a huge thank you, Shannon.

Garrick (49:54.83)
Thank you.

Garrick (50:03.522)
Thank you, Sean.

Shannon Minifie (50:03.661)
Thanks, Simon. Thanks, Garak. Nice chatting with you.

Simon Brown (50:07.45)
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