When I talk about curiosity I usually talk about experimentation and the need for failure. When teaching experimentation with games such as Eleusis Expeditious, I inevitably end up talking about the Information Theory curve. I learned about Information Theory from Don Reinertsen in his book Principles of Product Development Flow – specifically Principle V4:
“The Principle of Optimum Failure Rate. Fifty percent failure rate is usually optimum for generating information.”
I recently had an insight about a different way to think about curiosity which can be represented by a similar graph. With a change in the axis, we can call this Curiosity Theory.
What Curiosity Theory says is that if we know everything (on the right-hand side of the x-axis), then we will have no curiosity. Why would we when our knowledge is so complete? Equally, if we know absolutely nothing (on the left-hand side of the x-axis), then we will also have no curiosity. We wouldn’t even know what there might be to be curious about. The sweet spot in the middle is where we do have some knowledge, but recognise that we don’t know everything. Thus we could reframe Don’s principle to be:
“The Principle of Optimum Knowledge. Fifty percent knowledge is usually optimum for generating curiosity.”
This came from listening to a podcast which talked about curiosity and suggested that to encourage curiosity, we need to help people realise that they might not have all the knowledge. Rather than trying to tell people what they don’t know, we could encourage people to explain in detail what they do know. In this way, they might realise that they don’t know as much as they thought they did.
While I would warn that we need to be careful that we aren’t trying to trick people or embarrass people, I do like how this ties in with Argyris’s idea of Assertive Inquiry; asserting what we do know, and also inquiring about what we don’t know.
It also means that to encourage people to be more curious, we have to practice curiosity ourselves. It’s always possible that we don’t know as much as we thought we did!