Incuriosity Killed the Project

In yesterday's Angry Weasel newsletter, Leadership is a Constant Experiment, Alan Page was explaining how, as a leader, he gets better results by trying things intentionally, in public, in a safe way:

But in real work, confidence isn’t the superpower. Curiosity is.

I feel this too, although confidence, or the appearance of it, can get you a good way up the greasy pole, if that's your chosen destination.

In a post on LinkedIn today, John Cutler made an analogy between a software development teams and a restaurant kitchen where busyness is not a useful metric, and success means that great food is delivered as ordered in a timely fashion. He sadly concludes that:

... in software, effort is easy to generate, activity is easy to justify, and impact is surprisingly easy to avoid.

This is a tragedy that plays out over and over.

My primary goal in software is to help us to metaphorically put the right food on the right plates on the right table at the right time more often than not. And, while Page was talking about leadership specifically, I think curiosity is important to help achieve that aim for anyone involved in our business.

Curiosity helps us avoid simply accepting what we see, assuming what we'd like, or acceding to unreasonable assertions and it can do this at every level from a line of code through organisational structure to customer relationships.

Some people prefer to stay in "their" lane and I get that: we can't all own everything and the whole world shouldn't be in scope all the time. Curiosity killed the cat, they might say.

My advice is to start curious to discover what makes sense to consider at this time for this task and to remain open to curiosity while working because as your knowledge changes, that initial assessment might need to change too: incuriosity can kill the project.
Image: hang niu on Unsplash

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Hiccupps

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