Curiosity required
Genuine curiosity is crucial to helping people understand their own barriers to change.
By Simon HarrisI am reminded day after day how important it is to remain ruthlessly curious. Smart, capable people will either solve problems for themselves, realise they don’t know how, or realise they do know how but the environment is causing them to not do anything about it. This could be because they lack time, or they’re focused on other things, or any number of reasons. The trap is to think that I have the answers.
Here’s an example where I asked what I thought was a reasonable question but was in hindsight loaded with bias:
Q: Why aren’t we doing {A, B, C}?
A: Because it’s not important.
Q: It’s important to me. We should be doing it and we’re not. Why?
A: This has never been a problem. Why would it be a problem now?
That conversation went around and around for a while getting nowhere. So, I abandoned the approach and reflected on what was going wrong. Why couldn’t they see what I thought I could see? Why weren’t they worried about this the way I was? Were they naive?
At some point I realised I’d become stuck in a cycle of trying to be preacher, politician, and prosecutor. What I needed to do was flip things around, stop assuming the premise, and start acting like a scientist:
Q: What things would, could, or should we be doing but aren’t because we lack the necessary resources and time, or because we have skills and knowledge gaps?
A: {A, B, C, …, X, Y, Z}.
There it was. Smart, capable people already knew the answer. They weren’t naive. They knew what needed to be done, and they knew they should be doing it.
So what was stopping them? Why had they even gone so far as to say it wasn’t important to them?
I’ve observed that people will resolve dissonance in their favour, rather than have to sit with it. I’d mostly thought of it as choosing the “easier” option. What I had never really thought about (until this podcast episode) was that dissonance is a mismatch between belief and reality: You can choose to update your beliefs; or you challenge the reality.
Which in hindsight explains why, when I asked another question out of genuine curiosity, it became apparent:
Q: And, assuming you had the necessary time, resources, skills, and knowledge, how important do you think those things are?
A: Yeah, important. We’ve been wanting to do some of them for a while now but, didn’t feel we could …
They faced challenges they didn’t feel able to overcome, and that meant they experienced discomfort, i.e. dissonance. In order to resolve the dissonance, they had updated their beliefs: those things had never been a problem, and are therefore not important. The resolution of that dissonance looked like resistance to change.
Proselytising, making stump speeches, and reading facts into evidence rarely changes peoples minds. If anything, it’s likely to make them defensive, search for even more ways to rationalise their behaviour, and ultimately reinforce their position.
Instead, maintaining a mindset of curiosity and setting aside your own biases can reveal underlying conflict and help people motivate themselves into action.