Hi, everybody. It’s great to be here. I’m from Florida, so I always love coming back to Florida, and I love coming back to be a part of Frank. I’ve been here every year. It’s my first time speaking, so I’m excited to share some information with you. And I thought, when I first started developing this presentation on curiosity, I thought that it was a topic that would be super relevant to everybody here. And then I was convinced of that when I heard the theme song, To Seven Minutes in Heaven with a Scientist. And I love that line, everyone’s a little bit curious. And I think with this group, it’s probably that everybody is a lot curious, and I think that’s a great thing. The work that I’ve been doing and the work that I want to share with you is work that we’ve been doing on behalf of a large science and technology company. It’s a global company, and they want what a lot of companies want. They want to be able to stand out from the pack. And so we’ve been helping them to do that, but really helping them to do that in a way that would be meaningful. And we really wanted this to be something that would be meaningful for their business, something that would help them in building relationships with their customers. They’re a B2B company. But then the other important part of this is, in designing these programs for corporations, is to make sure that there’s something of societal value. And so that’s really important in the work that we’ve been doing for this client. And in order to help figure out what this would be, we talked with lots of people inside the company. Certainly our clients on the corporate communication side, talking to folks on the policy team, talking to the commercial sales people. They have a different perspective on the world. Very important to get in trying to design a program like this. And talk to people who worked in the employee cafeteria. And talk to people at the visitor center. They give you the badge when you go to visit. All to figure out what makes this company tick. What is it about the culture in this company that helps them to achieve success? But the group of people that I really thought were interesting and really gave us a glimpse of what this company was all about were the scientists. They have a unique way in which they do their work. Being a global science and tech company, of course a lot of scientists there. So we talked to a cross-section of them working on various things. And they all shared a common theme. That they have a tremendous ability to take risks for things. That they persevere. No matter what comes up, they persevere through obstacles and challenges. And they’re always exploring and asking questions. So they’re never satisfied with the immediate answer, but they’re always going beyond. One person who stood out in particular was a guy named Bob. And Bob works with the liquid crystals division of this company. So liquid crystals are in your phone. And in fact, our client’s product is, you probably all have it. You’re all probably on it, or it’s in your pocket or in your bag right now. They’re the largest supplier of liquid crystals. And Bob and his team were charged with coming up with other applications for liquid crystals. And what they discovered was when you apply liquid crystals to windows, it allows a user to control the light coming in. Almost like blinds, but there are no blinds there. It’s the material in the windows. So it’s incredibly energy efficient. And now a whole new line of green building materials has been developed with this company through Bob’s work. And he credits it really with this ability to continue to ask questions, to continue to explore. And so what we found out from scientists is that really the process of getting to the answer is in many ways more important than the answer itself. So the ability to ask questions. Now we know that children have no problem asking questions at all. And research will tell us they ask upwards of 300 questions a day. And that can be everything from the innocent, why is the sky blue, to why are the stars twinkle at night, to an example that I had from my cute little niece, Uncle Rob, why your ear’s so big. I didn’t want to tell her that it runs in the family. She’ll find that out later. Unfortunately, well, that question, fortunately. But mostly, unfortunately, these questions, they trail off quite a bit. This unscientific graphic shows that while kids are becoming proficient in every subject, whether it’s English or it’s math or it’s writing, when it comes to curiosity, they’re actually becoming weaker in that skill. So much so that our ability to ask questions or our comfort with asking questions trails off to almost zero by the time we’re adults. So we wanted to know why this is happening, what is going on with this phenomenon, and importantly, what can we do about it, if anything. And so we really started to explore what was going on with the goal of how can we inspire people to think more like a scientist. How can we inspire people to fearlessly ask questions like a child? We really wrestled with this and what was going on and explored several different aspects of curiosity. It’s quite an abstract concept. We looked at technology. You know, is technology helping us or hurting us? I thought back to when I was a kid and we had encyclopedias, remember those actual books? We had them on a shelf and it was almost like art and they were beautiful and I loved going through them. We don’t have those anymore. We have Wikipedia and Google and we have it all at our fingertips. We don’t have to really work very hard to get information. Does that help our heart? We thought about nature versus nurture. This innate that we are all curious and that we all want to ask questions, look at brain research and it will show that the reward system of the brain fires up when we’re faced with the unexplained and through that process of seeking out to find the answer, our brain lights up. We also know from research that it puts in a better position to remember things and of course, you know, that’s very powerful as well. We started thinking about how, you know, that’s the nature part. We thought about the nurture part. If we know that people are innately curious, how can we continue to build that and foster that? I think there’s sort of the myth of the lone scientist or the lone entrepreneur that exists. We always think that that scientist is tinkering away in her lab and she discovers the cure to a disease or it’s the entrepreneur working in his garage that comes up with the big technological breakthrough but the reality is most of us work in teams. Those examples that I just mentioned, those people probably had teams behind them backing up their work. So we wanted to figure out is there a way, can you engineer curiosity on a team in order to foster more of it in order to get the kinds of discoveries that we need? And so we wanted to find out, you know, what was going on with this and wanted to look at what makes up curiosity. We culled through thousands of academic journal articles, talked to a lot of experts in curiosity and innovation and came up with a construction of curiosity and four dimensions of curiosity that we think are very important. Inquisitiveness, creativity, openness and distress tolerance. Inquisitiveness, this is this exploration. And apart from the exploration, it’s the willingness to do it and the ability to accept that. So this is the, you know, there really truly is no such thing as a bad question or a stupid question. Does an organization really have that culture? Creativity, this is the due part. To what degree does a person or an organization really embrace novel approaches and build novel approaches to solutions or solutions to challenges. The openness part is the, that’s the attitude. How willing are we to embrace these new things, these new ideas, either our own or ideas that our team members come up with. And then this phrase, distress tolerance, what is that? So that’s, you know, how does the culture of an organization respond to risks? You know, are they willing to accept that failure might be an option, you know, and that they’ll learn from that and build on that? How do they persevere despite challenges and obstacles that come up? So through our research, we asked a couple of questions on each one of those dimensions and basically we’re able to get almost like a Myers-Briggs of Curiosity, which we refer to as the Curiosity Index. And we get that for organizations, so we can rank organizations and how curious they are and we did it on 16 different industries. And we can look at people as well and they get almost a, you know, curiosity score. This is the profile of the folks that scored themselves highest in curiosity, you know, average 40 years old, coming mostly from the West. We’re usually in positions of power and we’re exploring that concept of the power dynamic at work and how that can possibly be a bad thing in terms of hindering curiosity. And they’re more likely to be positive. They’re more likely to say their company’s doing a great job. They’re more likely to be satisfied at work. But we found some disturbing things from this. We asked people to describe their self at work. You know, what do you like? And we listed 20 different attributes that they could choose and you could choose as many as you wanted. And less than a quarter said they were curious. Instead, they favored the more traditional things. You know, there’s the top two where organized and detail oriented, almost like their boss was looking over their shoulders that were filling it out. And then, you know, things like funny or talkative, which we thought, well, that’s interesting. That scores higher than curious. Important and fun things, but you know, is that really, really most important in the work environment? But people want to be curious and they recognize that it’s an important part of their job. You know, two-thirds of the people in the survey that we did of 2,500 American workers said that coming up with new ideas is a significant part of their job, but they face tremendous barriers at work trying to do that and really rank their organizations as lukewarm at best in promoting curiosity. So it’s almost as if organizations are ringing the curiosity out of their people. And this is happening at a pretty important time in our history. You look at the pace of innovation in the world and things are really skyrocketing. So you look at things like the Model T or even the smartphone more recently. We’re on a much more linear path for how they scaled up. And today, you look at the tablet and it’s a huge spike in the very beginning right out of the gate. This kind of speed and innovation is going to require curiosity in order to continue to fuel that. And then you look at what’s happening in society. You know, of course, last fall, the development community rallied around the global goals and trying to develop solutions to the big challenges that still plague us in education and poverty, gender equality, health. And obviously, these are multifaceted. There’s lots of things going on with these issues. But one thing that we know is that there will always be a need for new solutions in trying to meet these challenges. And the curiosity is an important part of that. So I want to share some of the things that we’re learning along the way as it relates to curiosity and how you start to inspire this in your teams. And this is just the beginning of this. We don’t have all the answers. But these are some of the things that we’ve learned through the survey that we conducted. One is allowing flexibility in how people do their jobs and not being overly prescriptive that goes back to that whole exploration part of keeping curiosity alive. Watching out for top-down thinking, I mentioned the power dynamic, and a huge buzzkill to curiosity is if I as a worker know that the boss has already made the decision and it’s a foregone conclusion that I’m not really going to contribute. Creating a plan for innovation. You know, I think a lot of organizations will sometimes pay lip service to being curious. They want to be curious, but they don’t really do much about it. I think in order to really act on that, you have to have a plan for how you do it. And then I think in hand with that is showing, not telling. So to the extent that you demonstrate that there’s a preference for new thinking and new ideas and implementing those new ideas and new thinking, you’ll be seen as a curious organization and help to nurture that among your teams. The balancing of focusing on the here and now and the work that has to be on today with the things that are going to drive the future of your organization. And then providing the time and space. A lot of times people will say, oh, it’s about money. Well, it’s really more from what we heard in our survey about the time that’s required. So where are we going next? So, you know, we’re doing a couple things to evolve what we’re learning. We are continuing to build out the methodology and the construction of curiosity and what it is and how you measure it in a way that I think will be helpful to us as we go forward. Setting up with a roadmap or best practices to how you actually foster curiosity. But then we’re looking to actually prove that curiosity will create those discoveries and innovation that we need. Sounds intuitive. We would all think that makes sense, but nobody’s actually proven it. So we’re setting out to prove that link. And you can see how this would apply to the social sector in terms of advancing new ideas that are going to be more powerful and engaging more people to get the result that you want or the impact that you want to achieve or for the social entrepreneur, you know, who is trying to develop new products and services for people and get them out in the world to get them to as many people and to get them to them as fast as possible. Thank you.