The Case for the Curious Leader: Thriving Through Change and Uncertainty

Leading others is difficult. Whether managing a team of five or hundreds of thousands of employees, leadership at any organization comes with demands and burdens that can buckle superiors. 

A recent survey of thousands of C-suite executives found that inflation, trade wars and rapid AI adoption has created a veritable pressure cooker for executives across organizations. Leadership burnout is up 4% from two years prior, and over 43% of organizations surveyed lost half their leadership team in the past year.

Leaders need to know how to adapt in situations like these, where they are squeezed from every side with economic, social and technological challenges. But focusing on external pressures may miss the point. They need to focus on a core internal attribute: curiosity. 

“We come into the world curious,” says Tom Morris, a Yale-trained former Notre Dame professor turned public philosopher with over 30 published books such as the bestseller If Aristotle Ran General Motors and Stoicism for Dummies. Far too often he’s seen leaders treat curiosity as an unimportant ideal rather than a core “intellectual virtue” in the way philosopher Aristotle might describe. He thinks that view doesn’t place curiosity in the right frame. 

“This ability to admit we don’t know, and this ability to show genuine curiosity and to cultivate it in other people, I think it’s one of the most important leadership traits,” he says. 

Putting curiosity in its proper place

Morris is the founder of the Morris Institute for Human Values and has been helping business leaders at the highest levels cultivate curiosity and a love for learning in themselves and their employees for decades. In his experience, he’s seen far too many executives put up a facade of seeming to know—rather than face their uncertainties with courage and be curious. 

“That’s where leaders block their own ability to learn. And that’s where they abandon their own ability to teach,” he says. 

To the executives’ credit, according to recent research published in The Leadership Quarterly, showing uncertainty has been correlated with negative social influence in organizations. However, other research published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology suggests there could be an “honesty premium” for leaders who express internal uncertainty about decisions to stakeholders. 

While the jury is still out on how leaders can show uncertainty, Morris views proper leadership as a marriage between humility of character and nobility of purpose, with curiosity as a key ingredient. It’s a tense dance that pays off big for executives willing to learn the steps. 

“They need to be open, and they need to be honest. And too many people are afraid of the vulnerability that may result, equating [it] to weakness in people’s eyes, but very few people actually view vulnerability as weakness,” he says.

Wisdom from sages and scientists

Morris doesn’t necessarily reinvent the wheel when it comes to helping leaders reflect on the world around them. Instead, he relies on intellectual giants of old and digs up forgotten wisdom, putting these gems of sagacity in a new light. 

Take the work of Roman emperor and Stoic Marcus Aurelius, who Morris studied extensively for his recent work on Stoicism. Morris recounts one of Aurelius’ journal entries where the Roman leader wrote, “The obstacle is the way.” It struck him as a new way to approach problems. 

“And I think what he means, in almost a zen master sense, let any difficulty, any hardship, any challenge, any obstacle, spark in you such curiosity that you will figure out how to use it, not just how to get rid of it, but how to use this experience to be even better than you would have been without it,” he says. 

This idea isn’t unique to second-century philosophers either, Morris adds. Scientists take this approach to problems as well, viewing them as a positive rather than a negative. If a scientist has uncovered a new problem, they could end up winning a Nobel Prize, he quips. 

The ‘fertile soil for innovation’ 

Curiosity might sound like a nicety, but to Morris, it’s the engine of business innovation. 

“It’s the fertile soil for creativity and innovation. And if you talk to top business leaders, it’s going to be hard for them to imagine anything more important than creativity and innovation for their business,” he says. 

His statement rings especially pertinent in an age of continuous technological development, with AI leading the charge. 

As a case study from the past, Morris takes a page—or rather a letter—from the book of the renowned English poet John Keats. At one of his “wisdom retreats” that he hosts for people from all over the globe, Morris recalled a letter that Keats sent to his brothers regarding a conversation he had about how great individuals accomplish major feats—a topic any leader would eagerly engage in.

In the letter, Morris says, Keats ponders what qualities make people like Shakespeare accomplish larger-than-life achievements. Keats identified a key quality that didn’t have a name at the time; one he coined “negative capability.”

“[Keats] says it’s the ability to confront uncertainty, perplexity, ambiguity, the fog of the future, and not engage in an irritable rushing to judgment. But the ability to just sit,” Morris explains. “The great people, Keats is saying, are the people who are able to hang back and allow their curiosity, that pause moment, to just take it all in.”

Embed curiosity into company culture

Like any virtue or positive trait, Morris argues, curiosity is something business leaders can’t expect to grow on its own accord. It requires effort to become an intellectual muscle one is accustomed to flexing on a daily basis. 

On the plus side, we’re all arguably born with an innate desire to know, as Aristotle begins his famous Metaphysics. But, this desire only grows with use and atrophies without constant engagement. How can busy leaders keep their drive to know and create active? 

Morris has a remarkably simple solution: Make curious brainstorming a practice embedded in company culture. Not the kind of brainstorming where solving problems is the focal point, but a kind of dialogue focused on coming up with problems not yet noticed.

“What’s a problem we haven’t thought about solving? What’s a problem that could be posed with respect to our strategic plan, with respect to our goals this year?… And the more you cultivate that and people see it’s OK to do that, the more they’re going to sort of try it in their everyday life,” he suggests. 

The key to a new kind of leadership

The results of pursuing curiosity aren’t abstract, unlike Morris’ philosophical ponderings. They’re concrete changes that can completely transform a company from the top down. Morris recalls one such transformational example.

He was having dinner with the CEO of one of the largest communication companies in the world, along with a number of his direct reports. At the meeting, the CEO asked one of the team members why they hadn’t been first to market with their product. 

Morris was prepared for the worst. “At first I thought he was just upbraiding the guy,” he explains. But he was pleasantly surprised. The direct report calmly explained the rationale behind the decision to the CEO. 

The CEO’s response? “OK. I like that.” 

Morris casts the event as a testimony of the power of curious leadership. “At first, I thought he was just angry, but he was genuinely curious. And he asked some other follow-up questions that reinforced that. And it kind of reinforced to the guys around the table, it’s OK not to be first to market if we’re best to market.”

That’s the edge that being a curious leader cultivates. Not the ability to sit in wonder without action, but the virtue to approach a problem as something that shapes us and helps us evolve individually and collectively.

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