Learning & development
Make Curiosity a Workplace Habit: A Practical Role for L&D
By Agilinks
A colleague asks why a report takes three days to prepare. The answer is familiar: “That is how we have always done it.”
It may be an accurate description of the past. It does not explain whether the process still serves the business.
For L&D teams, curiosity becomes useful when people can question a routine, investigate what happens and test an improvement. A learning culture needs opportunities to do those things within everyday work.
Start with a question about the work
A general invitation to “be more curious” gives employees little direction. A specific question creates a starting point.
Ask a team to choose one recurring frustration: a repeated handover, a decision that waits for approval or a task that needs frequent correction. Then explore what the team needs to understand before proposing a solution.
Useful questions include:
- What purpose does this step serve?
- Who uses the information we produce?
- Where does the work wait, and why?
- Which assumption have we not checked?
- What would we need to observe to decide whether a change helped?
The goal is to understand the work together, without turning the conversation into a search for someone to blame.
Make it reasonable to say “I do not know”
People take cues from how managers respond to uncertainty. If every question receives an immediate answer, a useful investigation can end before it begins.
A manager can model a different response: “I do not know why that approval is needed. Let us check with the person responsible.”
In a learning session, facilitators can give participants incomplete information and ask them to identify what they would need to find out. This creates practice in recognising uncertainty, asking precise questions and resisting a premature conclusion.
Managers then need to make room for those behaviours back at work. Invitations to ask questions mean little if asking is treated as a delay or a lack of competence.
Turn discussion into a small experiment
A good question can lead to another meeting, or it can lead to a bounded piece of learning.
Consider a team that suspects its weekly status report contains information nobody uses. Rather than stopping the report immediately, the team could ask recipients which sections support their decisions. With the process owner’s agreement, it could trial a shorter version for two reporting cycles.
Before starting, agree the scope, owner, review date and evidence. In this example, the team could compare preparation time and ask recipients whether any necessary information was missing.
Keep experiments within the team’s authority. Changes involving customer commitments, sensitive data or regulated processes need the appropriate review and approval.
Give L&D a practical design role
L&D can connect inquiry skills with existing development priorities. A leadership programme might include asking questions before giving advice. A team development session might explore handovers. Product training might practise testing an assumption about a customer need.
Use relevant workplace scenarios, give participants time to practise and provide feedback on the quality of their questions. Help them distinguish observation from interpretation: “The request waited for four days” is different from “The other team does not care.”
Where an organisation has a competency framework, connect these activities to observable behaviours such as evidence-based decision-making, collaboration and continuous improvement.
Review what was learned, including what did not work
An experiment does not need to produce a successful change to produce useful learning.
At the review, ask what the team expected, what happened, what remains uncertain and what it will do next. Record enough context for colleagues to understand the result without creating a large reporting burden.
Avoid rewarding the number of questions or experiments alone. Those counts say little about whether a team investigated something worthwhile or used the findings.
For the next learning programme, choose one question participants can explore in their own work. Agree who will support them and when they will reflect on the result.
Curiosity becomes a workplace capability when a useful question leads to evidence, reflection and a considered next step.
Agilinks provides corporate training and coaching that connects learning with everyday work. Discuss your team’s development priorities with us.