About Us
Coaching curious and capable leaders. Developing and delivering high-performance
Productivity is essential to business success. But the pursuit of productivity too often comes at the expense of performance. Conventional approaches to boosting productivity, like working faster, harder, longer and more efficiently narrows our field of vision and erodes our capacity for curiosity. This can see us relying on incremental improvement of our habitual ways of doing things to repeat, or incrementally improve on, past successes. This approach does not serve leaders well in delivering high-performance against the demands and complexities of today’s fast-moving and ever-transforming business environment.
We believe cultivating curiosity in your thinking is the single best thing you can do to hone a high-performance mindset. Curiosity allows us to challenge our way of doing things, and the status-quo, to innovate more and identify more creative solutions to problems. Curiosity allows us to get more present to both our biggest opportunities and our hidden potential disruptors. Curiosity also makes us more resilient, more impactful, and more inspirational. As well as better at managing change and able to shape and shift organisational culture.
Elite athletes regularly cite the moment they realised they had to re-learn everything they thought they knew about winning at their game to keep winning and reach new heights of success. If they weren’t curious this would never happen. So just think what new heights you could reach by being more curious?
We’ve codified what it takes to become a more curious leader and are hired by some of the best and brightest global organisations to coach, develop and facilitate the thinking of their executives, leaders and teams. Delivering high-performance and transformational results every time.
About Diane
A curious thought leader
Diane Chappell is a seasoned expert in helping senior executives, leaders and managers to hone their leadership presence. In a career spanning more than 30 years, she has transformed the way many of the world’s biggest organisations approach the identification and management of strategic change, as well as the way in which they develop their people. Having worked both within corporate organisations, as well as a consultant to them, she has seen first-hand how the demise of curiosity in bigger business is making many of them less ready and competent to respond rapidly and effectively to the ever growing threat of disruption.
Diane has an unbridled passion for supporting others to bring their leadership skills, knowledge and capability to the fore. She believes in unlocking potential and enabling others to grow, develop and surprise themselves in the kind of results they are able to bring about.
She has a thirst for learning and exploring how to apply this to enhance organisational effectiveness and empower high performance and change engagement. Most recently her focus has been developing herself as a mindfulness teacher so she can bring some of the practices into the leadership arena. It is her mindfulness practice and some of the tenants of mindfulness that led to the creation of The Curiositas Method – a framework for developing more curious leaders. She is committed to learning, growing and evolving the role of leadership in today’s complex world
When not working with organisations, Diane spends time with family and friends, being in the wonderful outdoors with Olive her labradoodle and her daughter, being curious about developing her own mindful practice, supporting her local community to create a sustainable tree and wildlife strategy and following her many other interests.
Diane’s 7 reasons to be curious (+1)
#1 Curiosity supports our motivation, emotion and learning
The neuroscience… curiosity stimulates the hippocampus. Hippocampus is a brain structure embedded deep in the temporal lobe of each cerebral cortex. It is an important part of the limbic system, a cortical region that regulates motivation, emotion, learning, and memory.
If we want a strong, resilient and learning team or workforce, then creating space and the environment which allow people to indulge in curiosity is critical.
#2 Curiosity increases happiness - great counterbalance to anxiety and stress
In today’s world of volatility uncertainty etc. where people are feeling overwhelmed at the pace of change, curiosity brings a childlike spirit which invites exploration – and has a very different feel to it
By the way, long term stress, anxiety and uncertainty is a terrible state for the human brain to be in especially when we feel out of control. This often triggers the brain to produce more cortisol – our fight or flight reactor – great in short doses to help us in moments of stress, but when it doesn’t get switched off, is linked to dementia, memory loss etc. Interestingly, getting overwhelmed affects the part of our brain known as the Amygdala – one of the oldest parts of the human brain. When in overwhelm mode, we simply do not have the capacity for team work, collaboration etc which can have an inevitable impact on results.
Curiosity is being recognised for contributing to increasing levels of dopamine as it triggers new learning. This speaks directly into the biological benefits of a growth versus fixed mindset. It also speaks to increasing our levels of happiness or satisfaction with life.
#3 Curiosity fuels innovation and creativity
Most organisations I work with are chasing higher levels of innovation and creativity. We need to innovate to open up new revenue streams, new markets, etc. It’s pretty hard to achieve this without curiosity.
#4 How about agility? Surely curiosity is one of the major foundation blocks of truly agile teams and organisations?
The ability to flex, to alter course and adapt, to innovate, to fail fast etc are all pretty tough if you are fixed, rigid in your thinking or unwilling to play and test. Curiosity allows us to trial, to be ok with unearthing things as we go along and also to dust ourselves off and try again when we don’t get what we wanted or expected.
As leaders, can we stay with our own curiosity long enough to allow our teams to operate in a more agile way and therefore to allow for potential risks, for mistakes, for things to fail and also for new results and outcomes to emerge?
#5 Curiosity can enhance performance and productivity
When the economy is failing to flourish and our markets are changing, its easy to want to drive for greater productivity. However, in the UK, people are speaking about productivity being lower than it’s been for years . Curiosity can help us look at the underlying factors and explore, alongside colleagues, what factors are affecting productivity and explore how to address what is missing. It also acts as a great tool for engaging people, especially when we anchor it in high performance vs simply driving up productivity.
#6 Curiosity is central to substantial successful change and transformation
Change is hard. When moving from where we are to where we need to be, changing systems, processes etc. can all help. However, if we don’t engage our people and create the right culture and environment for the real conversations, we are likely to fail to fully deliver on our change or transformation effort. Encouraging our change leaders to be curious to hear what others are really saying is vital. Hearing how the change is occurring to them including their fears, worries etc. allows us to make adaptations and adjustments. If we don’t bring curiosity, we are likely to put things through the same old filters and keep doing the same old thing and, in all likelihood, nothing will fundamentally change let alone transform.
More and more I hear people talk about curiosity as being something they value. After all, it fuels scientific discovery, challenge and questioning, all of which help us come closer to conversations about purpose and meaning in our work and can support people and organisations to look through this lens at culture. This is central to all change and transformation.
#7 Curiosity is a great leadership quality and attribute
It speaks to me of inquiry. It feels youthful and playful and therefore joyful. What’s not to like in that?
If we can bring more of this into our organisations, into our change programmes, meetings and projects, into our town halls into our 1:2:1s and performance reviews, who knows what might get revealed!
+1 more reason
As someone with a strong mindfulness and mediation practise, I continue to be surprised and delighted about the curious nature of the mind.
Mindfulness is not about the absence of thinking – just try turning your thinking off! It’s about being present. It’s about noticing. It’s about not being judgemental about yourself and others and it includes the attribute of having a beginner’s mind – seeing things as if for the very first time – seeing every moment as unique and therefore requiring unique thinking. In organisations, of course, we want to bring our experience to bear but maybe this concept of curiosity could allow us to come with fresh new thinking to add to our experience. How might it change things if your organisation were able to leave behind some of its out-of-date thinking which is typically peppered with baggage and, instead, uses its knowledge and experience with an added dose of childlike curiosity? Entrepreneurial right?