How Do I Apply the Law of Curiosity at Work?

Short answer on how to apply the Law of Curiosity at work: change one question you already ask out loud every single day. You do not need a new meeting or a new system. You need to stop asking people for a status and start asking them why.

For about two years I ran a 7:05 morning huddle in Westbury. Eleven minutes, standing up, by the whiteboard. I asked every man the same thing. Where are you at? And every man handed me back the same thing. A number. A percentage. A line like still working on it. I wrote it all down, thanked them, and walked back to my office feeling organized.

Then one Tuesday a pump job was in its fourth day and the answer was still eighty percent. I was tired, and I asked the wrong question by accident. I said, what is in your way? The technician told me the gasket set had been on order since Thursday, and that he had been borrowing a seal off a spare unit so the job would look like it was moving.

Four days. One question. I had spent two years collecting numbers from men who were standing in front of problems I could have cleared in an hour.

What the Law of Curiosity Actually Says

The Law of Curiosity is the twelfth of John C. Maxwell's 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth, and it says this: growth is stimulated by asking why. Not by knowing why. By asking.

Read that again, because the verb is the whole Law. Knowing why is a place you arrive. Asking why is something you do out loud, in front of other people, before you have the answer. One of those is free and the other one costs you something. That is why most of us quietly stop doing it somewhere around year five of a career.

Maxwell lists ten ways to grow curiosity, and the first one on his list is the one grown adults actually need: believe you are allowed to ask. A four-year-old asks why forty times a day and nobody bills him for it. A forty-year-old maintenance manager asks why once in a staff meeting and spends the whole drive home wondering whether he looked like a man who does not know his own department.

That is the application problem in one sentence. At work, the thing standing between you and this Law is not curiosity. It is image.

Change One Question You Already Ask

The fastest way to apply the Law of Curiosity at work is not to add anything to your day. It is to swap one question you are already asking.

I asked where are you at for two years. It is a fine question if what you want is a number. It is a useless question if what you want is information. A man who is stuck will hand you a percentage, because a percentage is an answer that ends the conversation, and ending the conversation is the safest thing available to him while he is stuck.

What is in your way gets you the truth instead, because it hands him permission to have a problem. Nobody has to admit anything. The obstacle becomes the subject, and he is not it.

Your version of this will be different from mine. If you ask how did it go, try what surprised you. If you ask any questions, try what part of this are you least sure about. If you ask is it done, try what would have to be true for this to be done by Friday. Same thirty seconds of your day, completely different information coming back.

Do not announce the change. Just ask the new one tomorrow, and then keep your mouth shut for four seconds. Four seconds is much longer than it sounds, and it is where the real answer lives.

Five Ways to Apply the Law of Curiosity at Work

None of these take more than a few minutes, and all five are things you can start before lunch.

1. Ask the person closest to the work, not the person closest to you. The technician standing next to the machine eight hours a day usually knows. I have lost months to the assumption that information travels up a chart. It does not. It sits where the work happens and waits to be asked for.
2. Take the thing that broke twice and ask why five times. Five is not a magic number. It is just more than most of us can stand before we grab the first answer and run with it. Write all five down so you cannot quietly skip to the third one.
3. Write down the question you were too proud to ask in the meeting, then go ask it in the hallway within the hour. The hallway counts. Pride is a lot cheaper out there, and the answer is exactly the same answer.
4. Keep a running list of what you do not understand about your own job. Mine had eleven things on it the first time I tried this, and I had been doing the work for thirty years. Nobody sees the list. One item a month gets crossed off.
5. Once a month, ask somebody greener than you what they would change. Then stop talking and write it down, even the parts that are wrong. Especially those parts, because that is how you find out what your area looks like from where they are standing.

What If I Have Done the Job Twenty Years and Already Know Why?

This is the honest objection, and I have made it out loud more than once.

Experience hands you a file of answers that used to be right. The problem is that the file does not timestamp itself. I once spent a full year treating a good technician's sloppy work orders as a paperwork problem, because in my experience sloppy paperwork had always been a paperwork problem. I was not stupid. My answer was simply older than the situation in front of me, and I never asked one real question that would have told me so.

Here is the test, and it takes five seconds. When was the last time you learned something that changed one of your answers? If you have to reach back several years for an example, you do not know why anymore. You remember why.

The application is small. Once a quarter, pick one thing you are completely certain about inside your own area, and go ask the newest person why they think it works that way. You are not fishing to be wrong. You are finding out whether your certainty has been inspected since the day you built it.

Does Asking Why Slow the Work Down?

Yes. For about four minutes.

Then run the arithmetic on my huddle. The old question cost me eleven minutes a day and bought me a wall of percentages. The better question cost me maybe fifteen minutes a day and turned up a gasket set that had been parked in a purchasing queue for four days, with a pump down and a man borrowing parts to look productive. I was never saving time by not asking. I was moving the cost somewhere it would not show up on my calendar.

That is what not asking does. It never looks expensive in the moment. It bills you later, in rework, in turnover, and eventually in the one thing you cannot buy back: the man who stops bothering to tell you things.

Be Honest About What Curiosity Costs at Work

I am not going to sell you this as free, because it is not.

Asking why in front of people costs you the look of already knowing, and in some buildings that look is the local currency. You will ask a straight question in a meeting and somebody will answer it in a tone. You will ask your boss why and he may hear a challenge, because some bosses have only ever heard the word why from people who were arguing with them.

Two things lower that bill, and I learned both the hard way. First, ask why about the work, never about the person. Why does this step exist is a question. Why do you do it like that is an accusation wearing a question mark. Second, say plainly what you are doing. I am trying to understand this, not argue with it. That one sentence has saved me more grief than any technique I know.

Then there is the part nobody warns you about. Once you start asking, people start telling you things, and some of what they tell you will be about you. That is the real price of this Law. It is also the exact reason it works.

Common Questions About the Law of Curiosity at Work

What is the Law of Curiosity in Maxwell's 15 Laws of Growth?

It is the twelfth of the fifteen Laws, and it states that growth is stimulated by asking why. Maxwell's point is that questions, not answers, are what move a person forward. He gives ten ways to build the habit, starting with the one most adults need permission for: believing you are allowed to ask in the first place.

How do I ask why without sounding like I am challenging my boss?

Aim the question at the work and not at him, and say your intent out loud before you ask. Something like, I want to make sure I understand the reason behind this, not push back on it. Then ask about the step, the policy, or the decision. Most of the friction people blame on curiosity is really about where the question was pointed.

How many questions is too many to ask at work?

Fewer than you are afraid of. The real limit is not the count, it is whether you came back with the same question twice. Ask freely, write the answers down, and never make somebody teach you the same thing on Thursday that they taught you on Monday. Do that and almost nobody will keep score.

What is a good first question to ask in a one on one?

What is in your way. It beats how is it going by a mile, because it names an obstacle instead of asking a person to rate himself. If you want a second one, try what is the dumbest part of your week right now. You will get an honest answer and probably something you can fix.

Reflection Questions

1. What is the one question you ask most often at work, and what kind of answer does it actually produce?
2. When did you last ask a question in front of people that you were not sure you were allowed to ask? What happened?
3. Name one thing you are certain about in your own job. Who could tell you whether that certainty is still true?
4. Who on your crew knows something you have never asked them for?
5. What is the last thing you learned that changed one of your answers, and how long ago was that?

The Bottom Line

Do one thing this week. Pick the single question you ask most often, swap it for one that asks why or what is in your way, and then be quiet for four seconds after you ask it. One question, one week. That is applying the Law of Curiosity at work.

I ran that huddle for two years before I asked a man what was in his way. He had been waiting the whole time for somebody to ask. Nothing about me got smarter that Tuesday. I just finally pointed the question at the right thing.

So here is mine back to you. What is the question you have been meaning to ask at work for a month, and what exactly is it costing you to keep carrying it around?

This ties back to The Law of Curiosity — one of John C. Maxwell's 15 Laws of Growth.