“I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.” — Albert Einstein
I’ve written about curiosity four times in six years. Not because I ran out of ideas — because I keep circling back to it. Every time I think I’ve said what needs saying, I notice it again, sitting under some other problem I’m working through with a client. So this time, one piece, properly. Here’s the question underneath all four of those earlier posts:
Can curiosity actually be learned — or do you either have it or you don’t?
The car isn’t the driver
Picture a Formula One car on the grid. The chassis, the engine, the aerodynamics — all of it locked in months before the race, built to a spec that can’t meaningfully change once the lights go out. That’s IQ. Fixed. Whatever ceiling you were built with, you’re racing with it today.
What decides the race isn’t the spec sheet. It’s what the driver and the Pit Wall do with the car once the lights go out, reading the tyres, reading the gaps, reading what’s changing lap to lap and adjusting the plan before the moment’s gone. That’s EQ. That’s trainable. It’s a set of habits, built through practice and debrief, and it can be built in anyone willing to do the work.
Curiosity sits with the driver and the Pit Wall, not the chassis. It’s not a fixed trait some people are lucky enough to be born with. It’s a habit of attention, noticing what’s changed, questioning what you assumed, staying alert to the read rather than defending the plan. And like any habit, it strengthens with use and goes quiet with neglect.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. If curiosity were fixed, the advice would be “hire for it.” Since it isn’t, the advice is “build it”, in yourself, and in the people on your team.
What curiosity actually buys you
Here’s the plainest way I can put it: curiosity is what makes you want something different tomorrow than what you have today.
Every car on the grid is streaming telemetry, tyre temperatures, fuel load, gap to the car ahead, all of it, constantly. None of it means anything on its own. Data becomes drag, not drive, if it never reaches the Pit Wall, and the Pit Wall only earns its seat by staying curious about what the numbers are actually saying. The teams who win aren’t the ones with the most data. They’re the ones who keep asking “what does this tell us that we didn’t know a lap ago” — and act on the answer before the moment passes. That’s the undercut nobody saw coming. That’s strategic traction, not just tracking.
It’s no accident that “Curiosity & Quality Questions” is a named practice at two separate points in KingFramework — once in Shape & Prioritise, once in building the Unified Lens. It’s not a soft add-on to the model. It’s load-bearing. Without it, a leadership team optimises — gets better at what it’s already doing, tighter and faster, lap after lap of the same line. With it, they ask a different question entirely: not “how do we do this better,” but “should we even be on this line.”
So how do you “get it”?
This is where most advice on curiosity falls apart, because it assumes you’ve already got the headspace to be curious. Most people don’t. Flat out on the straight, all you can see is the wall in front of you — the inbox, the deadline, the fire that needs putting out before lunch. Curiosity needs a bit of space to operate in, and pressure is the first thing that takes that space away.
So the real question isn’t “how do I become more curious.” It’s “how do I choose the moment to lift, before something forces me to.”
A pit stop isn’t a loss of control — it’s a deliberate, planned pause to gather more information and change the plan before the race decides it for you. That’s the model. A few ways I coach people into that pause on purpose:
• Ask one extra question before you act. Not five — one. Before you approve, respond, or move on: “what am I assuming here that I haven’t actually checked?” Thirty seconds. Highest-leverage habit I know.
• Protect five unstructured minutes a day. No inbox, no meeting, no task. Just watch where your mind drifts when nothing’s demanding it. That drift is where the good questions live.
• Notice when you’re defending instead of reading. If you catch yourself explaining why a decision was right rather than testing whether it still is, that’s the moment to call the stop.
• Take someone else’s line through the corner. Ask the question a client would ask, or a competitor, or the newest person on the team who hasn’t yet learned “we don’t do that here.”
The bottom line
You don’t need a higher IQ to lead well through complexity — the chassis is what it is. You need the discipline to keep reading the race when everything about your day is pulling you toward certainty and speed instead. That discipline is learnable, in you and in the people around you, which means it’s something you can build, not just hope you were lucky enough to hire.
Whichever is greater will win — fear or curiosity. Choose curiosity, on purpose, today.
Ferne Eliz King helps executive teams and boards turn strategic complexity into clarity, and clarity into results. Get in touch, or subscribe to the newsletter for more.
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