How curiosity drives leadership, operations, and culture

Executive overview

Most leaders have growth goals but skip the harder question: are we willing to change how we actually operate? Jon Bassford argues that curiosity — applied systematically to people, processes, and culture — is what separates organisations that compound their success from those that plateau.

Three shifts are required: a growth mindset, operational excellence, and a curious culture. Without the first, the other two never start. Without the other two, the first stays aspirational.

Ego, fear, comfort, and habit are the enemies of curiosity — and they are all internal.

The three shifts of a curious leader

1. Growth mindset — the leader must genuinely want change, not just better numbers. Without this, no tool or framework moves the needle.
2. Operational excellence — regularly audit what you do, how you do it, and why. Curiosity about your own operations reveals gaps that strategy retreats miss.
3. Curious culture — create conditions where staff ideas, feedback, and questions surface freely and are acted on.

What a curious culture actually looks like

• Let staff speak first in meetings. When leaders go first, the room follows their direction.
• New hires are the best source of unfiltered feedback — they see what the organisation is too habituated to notice.
• Monthly or quarterly check-ins should explicitly ask: what's going wrong, and where can we improve?
• Break down silos and hierarchy so every employee can offer perspective — each person touches the business differently.
• Third-party reviews periodically provide the fresh eyes that internal teams can't.
• The leader must check their ego, bite their tongue, and create space for ideas that contradict their own.

Psychological safety and Google's Project Aristotle

Google's Project Aristotle set out to find what made teams successful. The answer was not intellect or diversity of background — it was psychological safety.

• Staff need to feel their opinions, ideas, and contributions are genuinely valued.
• If mistakes are punished, people revert to doing as little as possible to stay safe. Innovation stops.
• The "see something, say something" norm from public transit is a useful mental model: bring up ideas, suggestions, criticism freely.
• Culture is set from the top. Leaders must actively install mechanisms for open input — it does not emerge on its own.

Operational excellence: what it looks like in practice

• Most organisations fall into routines and never stop to analyse whether those routines still work.
• When something isn't broken, it doesn't get examined — until it stops working and the organisation is flat-footed.
• Audit operations annually: decision-making processes, efficiency, ability to change, the whole picture.
• Only once you understand your current state can strategy planning be grounded. Otherwise it's throwing darts at a dartboard.
• Policies and procedures that live in binders or appendices don't drive behaviour. Surfacing and communicating them does.

The buried document story

Early in Bassford's career, he discovered that the requirements for a field organisation were buried as an appendix in a district conference manual — seen only by those who attended. He pulled it out, condensed it to a two-page sheet, and made it a consistent reference in every communication.

• The word "requirements" was reframed as "deadlines and expectations" to make it actionable rather than bureaucratic.
• The document was introduced gradually, not forced — it took hold over time.
• Result over six years: 20% revenue increase, 500% increase in programming, record event attendance.

The lesson is not the document itself, but the act of getting curious about where critical information lived and what was preventing it from driving results.

The danger of a founder's original vision

A change-agent engagement at a declining membership organisation illustrates what happens when a founder's vision becomes a ceiling.

• The organisation had been losing ground to a competitor that had moved into video content.
• The CEO declined to pursue video because "that's not what I envisioned when I founded this organisation 27 years ago."
• Meanwhile, the CEO's rallying cry was: "We were founded the same year as Amazon — why aren't we Amazon?"
• Amazon launched AWS not from a grand vision but from internal need. They adapted. This organisation had stopped adapting.

Growth goals and growth mindset are not the same thing. One is a number; the other is a willingness to change what you do to get there.

Startups and the C-team trap

A common pattern in founder-led companies:

• Founders outsource the areas where they are strong — their true zone of genius — and keep doing the things they are weak at.
• The result is a team that collectively performs at a C level, even if individuals are A players in the wrong roles.
• The fix: identify where the founder is an A, B, C, and below — then hire to cover the non-A areas, not to replicate the founder.
• A players and A-type personalities are not the same thing. Match personality type to role requirements.
• Staff who enjoy 90% of their work outperform those who tolerate 90% of it. The same applies to founders.

Building curiosity as a habit

• Embed curiosity in the review process: make feedback, improvement suggestions, and open questions a standing agenda item.
• Foster awareness of where curiosity is absent in your own leadership — it may be strong in coaching conversations but weak in operations reviews.
• Bring in external perspectives regularly; internal teams normalise their own blind spots.
• Curiosity as a culture value needs active muscle-building, not just enshrining in a list of principles.