Tamil poet and philosopher Thiruvalluvar mentions in one of his couplets about food for thought. When roughly translated, his couplet means – when there isn’t enough food for thought, we tend to feed our stomach.

 

Friday June 24th 2022 was one day where there was so much food for thought that no one thought of what to fix for dinner !!! The minds of over 70 participants of the interactive webinar on “Building Workplace Curiosity” was sent on an exploration journey.

 

Stefaan van Hooydonk, founder of the Global Curiosity Institute and author of the bestselling book: The Workplace Curiosity Manifesto was the guest speaker who responded to a series of questions on how to make our workplace curious.

 

We had such a curious set of people who actively participated all through the session - starting from the trivia on “Why do tennis players bounce the ball before they serve?” to posting questions and comments on the zoom chat session.

 

• Stefaan brought in all his research findings and the experience of being an author to the fore for every question posed to him. He dropped diamonds on the dimensions of curiosity namely intellectual, empathic and self.

 

• He articulated how a leader’s influence on the team creates a curious culture and also directly pushes up learning in the organization.

 

• While highlighting why curiosity is so important today, he spoke about his research which correlates how leaders encourage or stifle curiosity in their teams.

 

• His explanation of the Aristotle Project in Google was an eye opener for most of the participants.

 

• Having played the role of Chief Learning Officer in many Fortune 200 companies, Stefaan articulated the challenges faced by L&D teams in pushing the curiosity agenda and how they can actively contribute to enabling a curious culture.

 

• He rounded off by stressing the need to be curious to create an innovation culture in organizations.

 

Thanks to all the curious professionals from across several industries and playing roles ranging from Business Heads, Sales Leaders, Project Managers, HR professionals, L&D professionals, Consultants, Tech Experts who made the webinar a grand success.