It’s the 1920s, and a Scottish bacteriologist had an unusual hobby. He painted.
He didn’t use oils or watercolors, though. He used bacteria.
Alexander Fleming hunted down microbes that grew in strange colors and collected them like a palette. He’d sketch onto agar with a wire loop, maybe a ballerina, a house, or a mother and child.
Then he’d tuck the dish into an incubator overnight and wait for the picture to grow. (Not exactly the kind of art you hang over the couch.)
He belonged to the Chelsea Arts Club. And when people asked what he did all day, he reportedly told them, “I play with microbes.”
His colleagues thought it was a quirky side gig. It turned out to be the best training he ever had.
Years of staring at petri dishes, looking for color and shapes of anything unexpected, made Fleming someone who noticed things.
So in 1928, when he came back from vacation to a messy stack of culture plates, he spotted one where a blob of mold had moved in and the bacteria around it had died off.
Most people would’ve tossed it in the sink with the rest of the dirty dishes. Fleming got curious. And that plate led to penicillin.
Penicillin didn’t start with a breakthrough. It started with a guy who’d spent years practicing how to pay attention.
The skill AI can’t touch
The World Economic Forum (WEF) released a report called New Economy Skills: Unlocking the Human Advantage, and Fleming would’ve loved it.
Its big argument is that in the age of AI, the most valuable skills aren’t technical. They’re human. Tasks tied to curiosity, creativity, empathy and leadership have only about a 13% potential for AI transformation, because they depend on judgment, context and lived experience that machines don’t have.
Good news, right? Sort of.
The same report found that curiosity and lifelong learning are the weakest human skill in every region of the world. Not most regions. Every single one.
Curiosity isn’t a microwave meal
It also takes a long time to build. In coaching data the WEF analyzed, half of learners needed about 245 days to develop curiosity, longer than any other human skill the report tracked. For 90% of people, it took more than two years.
It’s also surprisingly fragile.
When pressure builds, people narrow their attention to short-term problem solving, and exploration is the first thing to get cut.
To make matters worse, companies treat curiosity as a given. It barely shows up in job postings, so nobody hires for it, measures it or rewards it.
In other words, we’ve got a skill that’s worth more every year, takes the longest to grow, and disappears under stress.
That’s a big whopping gap
Most organizations just assume it’ll somehow just magically appear.
Give curiosity a petri dish
Fleming wasn’t born noticing things. He practiced. Thousands of small, playful experiments that didn’t need to pay off got him ready for the one that did.
That’s the part we like to skip. We want the penicillin moment without the years of germ paintings.
Curiosity needs somewhere to go. That could be an hour on the calendar set aside for a question that has nothing to do with this quarter’s deadlines. It could be swapping “What went wrong?” for “What surprised us?” in your next review. Or it could be recognizing the person who spots something odd, even when it leads nowhere. (Most of the time it will. That’s how it works.)
None of that’s very efficient. That’s sorta the point.
AI can process a petri dish faster than Fleming ever could. But it can’t wonder why the bacteria died.
So where are you giving your curiosity room to play?
Maybe there’s something to be said about wandering down rabbit holes.
