The curiosity to create meaningful connections
When was the last time you asked a colleague a meaningful question with the sole intention of getting to know them better?
Being curious about the people around us plays a key role in helping us understand and empathize with others. What are they going through? How are they feeling? What makes them happy? What personal challenges are they facing? Working remotely means we don’t always have natural opportunities to open up these topics. It requires us to be more intentional in our approach to building the right spaces to foster meaningful relationships.
“Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton asked why’’*.
Curiosity can be defined as the desire to learn and experience new ideas, and the willingness to change your mind. This desire is often the fuel for life-long learners and a key ingredient for success in intellectual work.
There’s another type of curiosity — one linked to the desire to know another person. This is called social curiosity, and it’s one of the foundations of meaningful social connections. We build trust, collaborate and create strong bonds by knowing each other, being close to one another and standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the people around us.
Trust and empathy are essential to building strong bonds in a group, and these can be stimulated by fostering social curiosity in members.
A connection starts with curiosity and a desire to discover more about each other.
The Curiosity cycle
Curiosity fosters understanding.
Better understanding fosters empathy.
Empathy drives healthy and safe environments.
Healthy and safe environments contribute to happier and more motivated people.
Happy and motivated people tend to be more curious.
Curiosity fosters understanding…
Can we enhance social curiosity in our life and work environments?
Todd Kashdan, a professor of psychology, suggests that we can train ourselves by intentionally asking open-ended questions that we don’t know the answer to. Engaging in curiosity games helps create a thrill of discovery and positive energy in a group.
I believe that in remote work environments, we should motivate our teams and encourage curiosity with the intent of creating a sustainable habit. I’ve experienced first-hand in curiosity games that knowing just a little bit more about someone leads to even more questions. I always end up wanting to learn more about someone in these games.
How can we foster social curiosity in a team?
One of my favourite techniques is a game I named “Know one and all”.
Audience: Team
Duration: 45 min (depending on the team size)
Team size: up to 12
Type: Remote or face-to-face.
Material: a piece of paper and a pen for each team member
How to play:
- First, line up all your team members in any order you like (you can find some fun ways to do that in this article). (Step 1)
- Next, take your lineup and arrange all your team members into 2 columns (Step 2). Each team member should appear once in both columns. The people in column 1 will ask questions, and the people in column 2 will answer them. Make sure the pairs don’t repeat.
- Now that everyone knows who they’ll be asking questions to, have them get their pen and paper. Get them to write down 7 questions about things they want to know about the other person.
- As the facilitator, explain the value of open-ended questions to the team. If anybody has a yes/no question, see if they can think of a way to turn it into an open-ended one.
- After everyone has reviewed their questions, ask them to select the top 3 questions they’re most curious to find out.
- If you’re in a room, create a circle with the chairs so that everyone can see each other. If you’re connecting remotely, follow the sorted line you used in step 1.
- Now for the fun part! Start with your first pair, and have the question asker read out their top question. Their partner will answer. Move on to the next pair, and repeat. Play up to 3 rounds.
Game tips: As a facilitator, don’t cut off the answers to the questions (even if you think your team knows them already). Usually, there’s something new in the answers that not everybody knows. At the end of the session, people almost always want to find out even more about each other. It’s a great moment to create even more curiosity by asking them to pick one more question and find time to ask it later on in the week.
Like this curiosity game? I’ll be sharing lots more activities you can use to foster social curiosity in my toolkit in future posts!
(*) Bernard Baruch
