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Are you leading from curiosity or from the comfort of what you already know?
I used to think that people in position of authority knew better, knew more and had all the answers.
I spent the early part of my career building myself into such a leader, who had a formidable library of answers and expertise. Answers about strategy, about people, about what works and what does not. I confused competence with self-worth, and thoroughness with wisdom. For a long time, I never challenged my perception, and my the world mirrored it back to me.
My biggest blind spot was that I had slowly and quietly narrowed my mindset. While, I would keep seeking new challenges and new work, I approached things the same way. My decisions were like variations of decisions I had already made. I was not growing. I was repeating, I was simply executing rather than innovating, with increasing sophistication.
What would happen to your leadership if you allowed yourself to not know?
The shift did not come from a course or a coach, though both played their part later. It came from a moment of complete and undeniable not-knowing.
In 2001, I was stung by nearly a hundred bees outside my condominium in Singapore and rushed to the ICU. As I lay there, stripped of every role and responsibility and carefully constructed certainty, I came face to face with something I had been expertly avoiding: I did not know who I was outside of what I knew. My identity had become my expertise. My sense of safety had become my answers. In that hospital bed, every answer felt suddenly, completely inadequate.
What I found in that space cracking open, slowly and uncomfortably, was curiosity. Not as a technique. As a lifeline. The genuine, open, almost childlike willingness to ask: what is actually happening here? What am I missing? What can this incident be trying to teach me?
That quality of attention, humble, honest, genuinely open, turned out to be more powerful than anything I had built from. I had been operating from either trying to prove it or pretending that ‘I know it all’. Both mindsets had become an invisible barrier to my growth.
Be honest: when did you last allow a conversation to genuinely change your mind?
The uncomfortable truth about high-achieving leaders is that the very qualities that drive success in the early stages of a career can quietly become the ceiling in the later ones.
You get good at your work. People recognise that you are good. You get rewarded for being good. And over time, a subtle but profound shift happens, you stop leading from curiosity and start leading from reputation. You stop asking because asking feels like doubt. You stop exploring because exploring feels like inefficiency. You stop being surprised because surprise feels like a gap in your preparation.
The mind accumulates so many perceptions, so many conclusions, so many reinforced beliefs, that it no longer encounters reality fresh. It encounters its own reflection. It mistakes the map it drew years ago for the territory that exists today.
I have sat with leaders who were genuinely brilliant, perceptive, experienced and deeply capable. They stopped growing not because they lacked intelligence, but because they had stopped being curious. The questions had dried up. The sense of wonderment had got buried. And their organisations, teams, and cultures quietly contracted to reflect the size of what their leader was willing to explore.
The "I know it all" mindset does not always announce itself dramatically. It arrives dressed as confidence. It shows up as the meeting where the outcome is often decided even before the conversation. The feedback is not genuinely absorbed. The strategy that worked last year, is treated as gospel, not because the evidence supports it, but because you have got habituated to working within a familiar paradigm.
What are you not asking that you should be?
When I finally made curiosity a genuine leadership practice several things shifted at once.
The first was in how I listened. I stopped listening to respond and started listening to discover. There is an enormous difference between these two. The first is a performance. The second is a genuine act of learning. People bring you their real thinking when they feel genuinely heard, not managed or assessed. A culture of openness is far more useful than the edited, pre-approved version they bring to leaders who believe that they have all the answers.
The second shift was in how I hired and built teams. I stopped looking primarily for people who thought like me and started actively seeking people who thought differently. Not for diversity as a policy but for diversity as a resource because I had finally understood that my own expertise, however deep, was a single instrument in what needed to be an orchestra. The curious leader knows they are not the whole. They know the collective intelligence of a room is almost always richer than any individual contribution within it.
We are each talented, expert, gifted in our own sphere. When leaders come together with curiosity across an organisation, a community, a collective, the outcome far exceeds the imagination.
The curious leader institutionalises this. They create cultures where questioning is encouraged rather than threatening. Where "I don't know, let's find out" is a sign of integrity, not inadequacy. Where the leader's own genuine curiosity gives everyone around them permission to bring their unfiltered ideas and views.
What would you be free to do if you stopped defending what you already know?
Here is what nobody tells you about letting go of the "I know" mindset: it is not a loss. It is an expansion.
When I stopped needing to feel in control, and have the answer in every room, my life opened up. I had more energy because I was no longer spending it protecting a position. I had richer relationships because I was no longer pretending or holding back. I had more creative bandwidth because my attention was no longer fully occupied by the known, it was free to roam into the unmapped.
This is what curiosity ultimately gives the leader: space. Space to envision rather than just execute. To take quantum leaps rather than calculated risks. To create rather than replicate. The leader who is not busy defending their existing knowledge is free to stand at the leading edge of new possibility.
The organisation reflects this shift and expansion. When the person at the top is curious, it gives everyone below them permission to be curious, make mistakes and be vulnerable. Questions become safe. Experiments become valued. Failure becomes information rather than a verdict. The culture expands to hold more of what is actually possible, because the leader's curiosity has made more of it visible.
What is the new thing you would like to try or learn today?
I want to ask you something directly. Not as a rhetorical flourish, but as an invitation.
When did you last allow something to completely surprise you? When did you last sit in a conversation without already knowing where it was going? When did you last say, I do not know. Tell me more.
Those moments are not gaps in your leadership. They are the growing edge of it.
The most enduring leaders have never stopped being students of their craft, of their people, of themselves. They have built extraordinary things not because they had all the answers but because they never stopped asking better questions. Their curiosity was not a charming personality trait. It was their most powerful strategic asset.
Steve Jobs invitation to ‘think different’ has given Apple the space to grow into a trillion-dollar organization because he gave permission to the team to step out of their comfort zones.
Now ask yourself and your team: what can you be curious about today?
That question, asked sincerely may be the most powerful leadership practice available to you. It is not always about getting answers, it is more about opening the door to an entrepreneurial mindset. This attitude allows you to build a relationship with your work, your people, and your own growth that makes great leadership possible.
Stay curious. The best leaders always do.
What is the new thing you would like to try or learn today?
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