Brain Rules for Baby (John Medina) / quote 29 of 91
Inquisitiveness, the innovator's DNA
What traits separate creative, visionary people who consistently conjure up financially successful ideas from less imaginative, managerial types who carry them out? Two business researchers explored that simple question. They conducted a whopping six-year study with more than 3,000 innovative executives, from chemists to software engineers. After being published in 2009, the study won an award from Harvard Business Review. Visionaries had in common five characteristics, which the researchers termed “Innovator’s DNA.” Here are the first three: • An unusual ability to associate. They could see connections between concepts, problems, or questions not obvious to others. • An annoying habit of consistently asking “what if.” And “why not” and “how come you’re doing it this way.” These visionaries scoured out the limits of the status quo, poking it, prodding it, shooting upward to the 40,000-foot view of something to see if it made any sense and then plummeting back to earth with suggestions. • An unquenchable desire to tinker and experiment. The entrepreneurs might land on an idea, but their first inclination would be to tear it apart, even if it was self-generated. They displayed an incessant need to test things: to find the ceiling of things, the basement of things, the surface area, the tolerance, the perimeters of ideas—theirs, yours, mine, anybody’s. They were on a mission, and the mission was discovery. The biggest common denominator of these characteristics? A willingness to explore. The biggest enemy was the non-exploration-oriented system in which the innovators often found themselves. Hal Gregersen, one of the lead authors of the study, said in Harvard Business Review: “You can summarize all of the skills we’ve noted in one word: ‘inquisitiveness.’ I spent 20 years studying great global leaders, and that was the big common denominator.” He then went on to talk about children: “If you look at 4-year-olds, they are constantly asking questions. But by the time they are 6½ years old, they stop asking questions because they quickly learn that teachers value the right answers more than provocative questions. High-school students rarely show inquisitiveness. And by the time they’re grown up and are in corporate settings, they have already had the curiosity drummed out of them.