A Deep Dive Into Our Guiding Principles: Curiosity
This is part two of a four-part series about our organizational values: Interconnection, Curiosity, Joy & Rest, and Action
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About our Values
If you’re here, you likely value building and retaining demographically diverse teams, treating people equitably, and having an inclusive workplace. Our work is about helping you bridge the gap between those values and your day-to-day actions, putting sustainable systems in place so that practicing what you preach is core to how you operate.
We know that we’re not going to be very effective at helping you with this unless we’re well-practiced at doing it ourselves! With that in mind, here’s a deep dive into the second value we hold ourselves accountable to practicing in our work – with each other and with our clients: Curiosity.
Curiosity
We cultivate curiosity as an asset.
What does this mean?
We believe that change happens through curiosity and productive discomfort, not judgment. This means we challenge ideas, not people, and embrace our inherently human imperfections and mistakes as learning opportunities.
We don’t expect any single person to know everything, and we appreciate the value people bring to a conversation by asking questions when we don’t understand.
We meet each person at their starting point (never judging them for where that starting point is) and help them get to the next step on their unique journey. Rather than judging anyone for how long their journey is taking, we celebrate each other for giving ourselves the opportunity to learn so that our behavior can be more aligned with our values.
Excited about fostering curiosity in your DEI work?
Try some of these ideas:
1: Get better at feedback
A core tenet of what we teach in our workshops and coaching on feedback is that harnessing curiosity about others’ experiences is a powerful antidote to what tends to be our default setting: judging ourselves and others.
This way, moving through conflict together can help strengthen our relationships instead of eroding them.
3: Celebrate questions
We’ve all nodded along as though we know what someone is saying even though they’re using terms we’re not familiar with – but that’s no way to actually learn.
Instead of shaming each other for what we don’t know, we lean into the value add of a beginner’s mind and encourage questions.
We create so much more room to grow and strengthen our DEI practices when we’re able to identify what we don’t know and ask for more information.
2: Take accountability
Curiosity in interpersonal interactions doesn’t work unless we each take radical responsibility for our impact – so that’s another core tenet of what we teach in our feedback workshops and coaching. This can be hard! To help, we harness curiosity when we learn that we’ve caused unintentional harm, asking ourselves questions like, I wonder where I learned that harmful behavior? I wonder what compelled me to act that way? How might I support myself to act differently in the future?
4. Lean into productive discomfort
When we notice we’re feeling uncomfortable in our work, we strive to ask questions rather than disengage. First, we turn inward and ask ourselves where our discomfort is coming from and what it’s trying to tell us. (And to make sure we’re not actually being harmed.) Then, we ask questions of the person who’s said something that made us uncomfortable so that we can better understand their experience. Throughout, we return to the values we share with the other person as a grounded place from which to root us as we work across our differences.
Whose work has informed this value?
The concept of Beginner’s Mind (shoshin) in Zen Buddhism and Japanese martial arts teaches us that we bring value to conversations and collaborative work by speaking up to ask questions that we might otherwise worry will make us sound naive, as this can help everyone reassess things that were previously taken for granted.
Layla F. Saad’s work on helping become a good ancestor and grappling with our personal relationships with white supremacy teaches us that approaching ourselves and others with gentleness while taking responsibility for our individual and collective healing is a key component of leaving a legacy of liberation.
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