Radical Curiosity

1. Curiosity is an Endangered Species Requiring Radical Action

The extinction of curiosity stifles our imaginations, paralyzing our ability to author better futures.

Modern world's design. Our modern world has been inadvertently designed to eradicate curiosity, prioritizing quick solutions over deep questioning. This emphasis on immediate answers and transactions stifles imagination and limits our ability to address complex challenges effectively. The potential extinction of curiosity is an emergency that demands immediate attention.

Radical questioning. To save curiosity, we must adopt an appetite for radical questioning, excavating and interrogating the essential foundations of today's problems. This involves challenging commonly held beliefs and embracing inquiries that can reorient, rehabilitate, and regenerate our approach to complex challenges. Radical Curiosity questions commonly held beliefs to imagine flourishing futures.

Cultural interregnum. We are living in a cultural interregnum, a transition between fundamentally different sets of values. This period is marked by the decline of old ideas and the emergence of new ones, creating friction and uncertainty as society grapples with evolving norms and beliefs. Radical Curiosity is essential for navigating this transition and authoring new stories that reflect our values.

2. Reimagine Learning as Exposure to Diverse Experiences

Experiences are profound instructors.

Experiential knowledge. Traditional education often prioritizes informational knowledge over experiential knowledge, limiting our understanding of the world. Experiential knowledge, gained through multisensory witnessing, is a more profound instructor that fosters humility and expands our worldview. Exposure to diverse environments and situations converts the unknown from friction to adventure.

Travel as education. Travel, in this context, is not about luxury but about exposure to diverse ways of being in the world. It becomes the most significant form of learning because it is the primary source of lived knowledge. By extending our geographic radius, we extend the radius of our worldview, overturning assumptions and questioning false constraints.

The danger of a single story. Limiting our exposure to diverse ways of being in the world narrows curiosity and perpetuates echo chambers. We must actively seek out windows that allow us to safely peer into unfamiliar worlds, recognizing that there is more to the human experience than our own limited perspectives. Diversity is not merely a corporate policy; it is a prerequisite for surviving the twenty-first century.

3. Unlearning is a Form of Activism

Learning is a political act because all learning consciously or unconsciously impacts our ability to contribute to a more—or less—moral world.

Education vs. learning. Traditional education systems often prioritize vocational training over critical thinking, treating knowledge as a static object to be banked rather than a dynamic process of inquiry. This approach stifles curiosity and limits our ability to challenge inherited realities. Unlearning, on the other hand, requires stepping outside of existing mental models and embracing new ones.

Unschooling and self-directed education. A growing movement for "unschooling" or "unlearning" challenges the traditional education system by respecting each student's passions, encouraging self-sufficiency, and turning the city into a classroom. This approach seeks to decolonize education and empower individuals to become active agents of change in the world.

Activism through learning. Learning is a political act because it impacts our ability to contribute to a more moral world. By embracing activism as the intentional acts carried out by each generation to guide us from legacy narratives to new challenger narratives, we can transform learning into a practice of freedom and a force for social justice.

4. Stories are Regenerative Catalysts for Flourishing Futures

We often tell our students, “The future is in your hands.” But I think the future is actually in your mouth. You have to articulate the world you want to live in first.

Stories shape reality. Stories are powerful frameworks that help us work out who we are in the present moment and what we value. They are everywhere, even when they are not explicitly there, coded into the objects, behaviors, policies, and assumptions that our shared world is built upon. We need to become more curious about how powerfully stories shape us and the common agreements that construct contemporary society.

Discerning and authoring narratives. Surviving the twenty-first century requires the ability to discern which stories are true and which are really forms of selling or marketing. We then have to author new stories fit for the contemporary condition. This involves naming legacy narratives, identifying upending indicators, and imagining and articulating emerging narratives.

Stories as social infrastructure. Stories are intangible forms of social infrastructure, acting as shared sheet music to guide the orchestration of society. By translating and applying the concept of social infrastructure to stories, we can harness their power to regenerate worlds and build a better future.

5. Reclaim Participation in Public Life Through Inquiry

Participation is everything—and the failure of government to be relevant is not luring people to get in the game.

Decline in civic engagement. Despite advancements in inclusivity, voter participation has declined significantly over the past 150 years, indicating a growing disconnect between citizens and their government. This limited participation is a form of civic decay that undermines the health of the public sphere.

Relevance of government. A government is a system for organizing a community in accordance with the values of its people. When a government fails to reflect the values and needs of its citizens, it becomes irrelevant and loses their trust. This can lead to apathy, disengagement, and the emergence of new challenger narratives.

Rebuilding trust through inquiry. To reclaim our government and our democracy, we need to reinvest in the currency of our social contract: trust. This requires engaging in honest, earnest, and constructive exchanges, asking essential questions, and being interested in one another. Inquiry, when done honestly, builds bridges within communities and fuels meaningful cohesion.

6. Dialogue, Not Division, is the Antidote to Polarization

We are losing our ability to converse, to exchange ideas, to find common ground, to live in dialogue and find cooperative ways to move forward.

Normalization of divisiveness. We have normalized divisiveness, actively undermining one another and gaslighting victims into questioning their sanity. This has led to a loss of honest, earnest, and constructive exchanges in civil society, vaporizing the appetite for inquiry.

Polarization vs. difference. Polarization is the division into two sharply contrasting groups, while difference is the orchestra of diversity. When difference is embraced, it can lead to discourse and discovery. However, polarization breeds anger, extremism, and a sustained disorientation that weakens our ability to make sound decisions.

Dialogue as medicine. The only medicine for this mental health pandemic is dialogue. Conversations lead to fixing the mess, slowing us down, changing our tempo, and putting us in a state of hearing each other, able to gain new insights and engage in peaceful cooperation, shrinking the distance between the two polar end points.

7. Embrace Outsideness Over Otherness to Build Bridges

In the absence of dialogue, we cut ties with others and live in isolated echo chambers, reinforcing the narrative of the self as the exclusive perspective.

Outsideness vs. otherness. Outsideness is the humility to depend on others to see ourselves, while otherness is built upon a false sense of superiority that eliminates opportunities for understanding. In the absence of dialogue, the beautiful integrated nature of outsideness falls away and the segregated nature of otherness sets in.

The dangers of otherness. Otherness is the parent of racism, bred when we are unfamiliar with one another. Without dialogue, we do not see the "other" as interconnected with our understanding of ourselves. This can lead to dehumanization, division, and the erosion of social cohesion.

Codes of belonging. Othering is expressed through codes of belonging as well as difference. Most commonly, pronouns convey the boundaries between "we" and "them" through the use of first- and third-person plurals. "We" belong; "they" are Other and cannot belong.

8. Ask Essential Questions to Unlock Transformative Insights

I believe that all value creation originates in the quality of an essential question.

The business graveyard. The business world is a graveyard of unasked questions, bankrupting society. We need to shift from administering the mundane to engaging in meaningful inquiry. Labor for the sake of laboring is the workplace equivalent of empty calories.

Problem-framing. We need to start investing more time in understanding the problem. If we can treat problems as questions, we can better understand what we are solving for and align on the necessary steps to get there. This requires a shift from problem-solving to problem-framing.

Vision, vehicle, impact. Framing a compelling essential question, imagining what achieving the desired answer to that question might look like, and distilling the vehicles to deliver on such a promise are the real work of leadership. These are the building blocks of a cohesive strategy.

9. Reclaim Your Time from Digital Manipulation

We are no longer the exclusive stakeholder in our personal relationship with time. Our time is no longer our own.

Digitization of self-interests. We are no longer the exclusive stakeholder in our personal relationship with time. Our time is no longer our own. Time is a nonrenewable resource facing a different kind of climate crisis.

Neurological addiction. The behavior modification Lanier describes, combined with the artificial pleasure Levitin calls a “neural addiction,” keeps us in a kind of intoxicated state. A state that has us less intellectually aware, less in control of our own decisions, and less conscious of the hidden actors and interests choreographing those decisions.

Deconstructing time. The digitization of time is a process of deconstructing and redistributing time into micro-bites (or bytes) of smaller and smaller interactions. This is in part because the digital world values the existence—the visual proof—of an interaction over the depth or quality of the interaction.

10. Time Travel is Possible by Challenging Legacy Narratives

Those who reject the “dogmas of the quiet past” will forever be ahead of their time.

Time dilation. Time dilation as a social idea could be a useful cultural framework. I would propose an expanded interpretation of time dilation as the difference in the time it takes to encounter or absorb new thinking based on history and culture acting as centers of gravity impacting how people experience change.

Time readiness dilation. A proper reintroduction of such a concept might be called “time readiness dilation.” A singular global event will be registered differently based on an individual’s previous experiences (their history and culture), the place they occupy on the chronological scale of historical time (center of gravity), and their willingness to move toward or away from change (an alternative kind of velocity).

The future is unevenly distributed. People come to embrace complex change on their own timeline, based on the gravitational pull that either slows or accelerates their acquisition of new narratives and knowledge. This timeline is often a function of economic, cultural, and geographic conditions.

11. Befriend Slow Time to Cultivate Meaning

To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.

Abusive relationship with time. Our relationship with time is dictated by the relentless frequency of transactions that mark our daily lives, slicing our time into smaller and smaller consumable parts. We've surrendered our very definition of time to an economic vocabulary.

The value of idleness. The rapid advancements in machine learning and artificial intelligence have become overwhelming. The arrival of the extraordinary capacity of our production economy and its impact on the future of labor is what Andrew Yang, a 2020 U.S. presidential candidate, calls “The Great Displacement.”

Acoustic ecology. There is an emerging genre of champions who are befriending the sound of slow time. We need slow time to provide a space for curiosity to flourish. New ways to drown out the ever-present noise with precious quiet.

12. Imagination is Our Most Valuable Natural Resource

The only way to effect real change is to show people a future more exciting than their past, and inspire them to work together on the journey.

Imagination as a luxury good. We have reached a state of imagination inequity, where survival economics have made imagination a luxury good. This limits our ability to address complex challenges and create a better future for all.

Creativity as a process. We need to shift from viewing creativity as a product to understanding it as a process. This involves recognizing the value of inquiry, experimentation, and collaboration in generating new ideas and solutions.

The power of utopia. We need to reclaim our civic imagination and embrace the pursuit of utopian ideals. This involves challenging commonly held beliefs, imagining alternative futures, and creating spaces for dialogue and experimentation.

Last updated: April 19, 2025