At my nephew’s wedding reception last weekend someone told me that crow’s remember people’s faces. Being the farm kid I am, and never having heard this before, I naturally had to do a little digging.
Turns out researchers at the University of Washington tested it by wearing a creepy caveman mask when they captured and banded wild crows. After they were done, the crows scolded anyone wearing that same mask. Years later, the crows still remembered it. Even weirder, crows that had never even been captured learned to recognize the face, too!
So, naturally, I had to know what else crows tell their friends about us.
And down the rabbit hole I went.
45 minutes later, I knew about crow grudges, crow funerals, the gifts they sometimes bring people, and a whole lot of other things I didn’t know I needed to know.
By most measures of productivity, I’d just wasted an hour.
I didn’t finish anything. I didn’t cross anything off my list. I didn’t even have a reason to know this stuff.
But according to new research, that may be exactly the work I was supposed to do.
Curiosity is inefficient
Researchers Todd Kashdan, Patrick McKnight and Spencer Harrison just published a major review on curiosity at work. They call their model productive inefficiency.
I love that phrase because it flies in the face of just about everything we’ve been taught about getting work done.
For years, we’ve been squeezing inefficiency out of our days. Shorter meetings. Faster decisions. Tighter agendas. Better processes. Fewer distractions. Get to the point. Stay on task.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of that. I certainly don’t want a three-hour meeting that could’ve been an email.
But there’s a catch. Curiosity is messy.
Curious people keep asking questions while everyone else is walking out of the meeting. They stick their nose in places that have absolutely nothing to do with them. They talk to people who don’t know anything about their industry. They chase ideas that probably go nowhere.
From the outside, all of that can looks like a bumbling waste of time.
Researchers argue all this creates a short-term cost. Curiosity takes time, attention and resources and never gives you any guarantee that something useful will come out the other side.
But sometimes it does.
And that’s where the inefficiency becomes productive.
You don’t know which rabbit hole matters
This is the frustrating thing about curiosity. You can’t make it efficient without taking away some of what makes it valuable.
If I tell you exactly which rabbit hole to go down, how far to go and what you should find when you get there, you’re not really exploring. You’re just following directions.
The whole point of a rabbit hole is that you don’t know where it’ll take you.
You notice something strange. You wonder why. You click. You read. You ask somebody. You make a connection that seems ridiculous. Then that connection reminds you of something completely unrelated. Like crow funerals.
Most of it goes nowhere. Until it goes somewhere.
That’s how we find dots we didn’t know existed. And we can’t connect dots we never bothered to collect.
We’ve made wandering feel irresponsible
This’s where work’s gotten particularly tricky.
We’ve become brilliantly productive at measuring visible productivity. How many things did you finish? How fast did you reply? How many meetings did you attend? How much did you deliver? How many boxes did you check?
It’s way harder to measure the value of staring out the window for 10 minutes because something doesn’t make sense.
Or having coffee with someone whose job has nothing to do with yours.
Or reading something that has no obvious connection to the project sitting in front of you.
Or saying, I know we’ve already decided, but there’s something I’m still curious about.
Those things can look unproductive right up until the instant one of them changes how you see the problem.
And by then, we usually call the result creativity or innovation and forget about all the wandering that made it possible.
Maybe curiosity needs a budget
One of the ideas in the research that sticks with me is that organizations shouldn’t just tell people to be curious. They need to recognize that curiosity uses resources.
In other words, maybe curiosity needs a budget.
Not necessarily a line item on a spreadsheet. But time. Permission. Space to follow something without knowing whether it’ll pay off.
Because telling people to be curious while scheduling every minute of their day is a little like telling them to explore while handing them a map with a single approved route.
So this week, waste a little time.
Follow something simply because it caught your attention. Ask the extra question. Read the article that has nothing to do with your job. Talk to someone who sees the world completely differently than you do.
Go down the rabbit hole without demanding to know where it leads.
Because sometimes the most productive thing you can do is something that doesn’t look productive at all
