A suggested New Year’s resolution: be more curious
Photo credit: Joakim Honkasalo via Unsplash
When I was growing up, my Dad and my uncles were always working on cars and motorbikes. This was partly through need: they didn’t have much money and they had to travel for work, studies and family life, so fixing a car using spare parts, ingenuity and improvisation was an essential skill. They also enjoyed it: it was as much of a hobby as a necessity.
It was not a practice I ever acquired the skill or the appetite for. I was much more interested in reading books than getting my hands covered in grease and oil. I enjoyed spending time with my Dad and Uncles as they struggled to fit strange shaped pieces of metal into strange shaped spaces, and as they scoured scrap yards to find an old car with the right part. But I never really understood what they were doing.
In some ways, it might seem good that I saved my time and intellectual energy and didn’t bother learning how to repair cars. Carrying out your own repairs is a lot less common and a lot more difficult now - unless you are a fan of vintage cars. Modern cars are sealed units where even skilled mechanics are lost without diagnostic computers.
And yet I regret not expressing more curiosity all those years ago. As well as giving me a mental model of how cars work, which would have been helpful when I finally learnt to drive in my late twenties (I am one of those people who finds it easier to learn practical skills if I understand the mechanism I am manipulating), it would have brought me closer to my family, and given me a better understanding of what they found interesting and why it mattered to them.
There is an obvious analogy to my current professional life. I often feel that I am now in the role of the professional tinkerer who also happens to enjoy what he does. Dealing with enterprise technology can sometimes feel a lot like working on an old car: an old legacy system might have been designed to cope with very different traffic and safety requirements, but nevertheless needs to be kept going in a vastly changed environment. Getting such systems to work means scrounging up hardware, software and skills from across a landscape of vendors, resellers and experts - and sometimes hobbyists and eBay. It also means keeping track of the latest models, versions and standards, understanding what the physical and logical components are and how they fit together.
And I often feel that non-technical colleagues have a similar attitude to that which I had when I was younger: somewhat interested in what is going on as an activity that friends and colleagues seem to think is important; definitely interested in the end result - a working system; but mostly incurious about how it all works. And, if they are prepared to admit it - as I should have been prepared to admit - daunted by a world which is so full of confusing terms and prior knowledge that it is difficult to know where to start.
It is possible to justify this lack of curiosity; it is definitely possible to justify feeling daunted by a complex, impenetrable field. After all, eventually the car will start, or it won’t. The system will work or it won’t. If everything is working, there’s no need for further action. If nothing is working, then the last thing that the expert needs is an amateur looking over their shoulder asking questions and offering suggestions.
Except . . . as I said above, I regret not being more curious when I was younger. As well as learning about a field I didn’t understand, and growing closer to my family, those vehicles mattered. It’s not an exaggeration to say that they represented independence, freedom, and financial social well-being - as well as, when we were on the road, physical safety. Paying more attention to how they worked, why they kept breaking down, and why we couldn’t afford more reliable cars would have been worth the effort.
Similarly, I think that if you are a non-technical business leader who is not curious about the how your technology works, you would do well to acquire more curiosity. Technology is as vital to the well-being of your business as a car was to my Dad when he was a sales rep. It determines your customer experience, your operational efficiency, your profitability and your security. It is not the only thing which determines the success of their business, but it is an increasingly important one - often to a degree which is far deeper and more profound than you realise. Incuriosity is a choice, and incuriosity about the forces that operate your business is a dangerous choice. Besides, more understanding of your technology would bring more understanding of your team.
It’s New Year’s day today. Maybe a good resolution is: be more curious.
