The Fantastic, Super-Sized, Research Proven Benefits Of Curiosity

The future belongs to the curious!

Curiosity is the key to success both now and in the future. When curiosity is combined with passion, aspiration and accomplishment it creates a winning formula resulting in achievement.

Conference organizers that create a culture of curiosity gain both a short and long term competitive edge. Those that exhibit curiosity tend to be more creative, more successful, and more fulfilled say researchers. Cultivating a culture of curiosity is good for business and it’s good for your conference too.

The Curiosity Beneficial Facts

Curiosity is as important as intelligence in determining success and performance.

Curiosity is basically a hunger for exploration…I’m a strong believer in the importance of a hungry mind for achievement, so I was just glad to finally have a good piece of evidence that supports curiosity’s influence on success. ~ Sophie von Stumm, University of Edinburgh in the UK of Goldsmiths.

Stumm and her research coauthors demonstrated that curiosity has a huge positive effect on performance, job success and learning.

They showed that those who embrace curiosity tend to be more creative, more successful and more satisfied.

Curiosity is also an excellent predictor of achievement says von Stumm.

People with higher curiosity outperform their peers when faced with a creative problem-solving task state researchers Jay Hardy, Alisha Ness and Jensen Mecca.

Creating a culture of curiosity is good for business!

Cultivating Conference Participant Curiosity

Cultivating participant curiosity is good for your conference business too!

To avoid creating conference passive attendees that become easily bored, you want to create experiences that stoke their curiosity.

So, how do you do that?

1. First, you must model it.

The assumptions we use to plan our conferences often limit fresh perspectives. We can fall out of touch with the deeper questions and lose the willingness to ponder.

2. Ask some big questions.

Why does this happen? How can we improve this? What if we did this instead of this?

Often the responses to those questions create more questions. This leads to a pursuit of inquiry that can open up new perspectives, insights, patterns and paths in our planning process.

3. Design engagement mind-set conference experiences.

This inquiry-driven practice ignites designing conference experiences that helps participants reclaim their curiosity. As you design the conference, embrace engagement mind-set experiences that actively involve audiences instead of an entertainment mind-set programming that promotes passive consumers.

4. Focus on designing relevant, contextual conference experiences for your target market.

Why? Because curiosity demands that we engage with the world around us right now in meaningful and complex ways. Provide safe spaces for participants to explore, question and challenge their preexisting beliefs while considering new ideas.

5. Market how you and your team use curiosity to drive your planning.

Then invite participants to ask similar big questions about their common assumptions regarding their work.

Reclaim Curiosity

Helping your conference participants reclaim their curiosity is vital to their ongoing success. It is the fuel that drives creativity and intuitive leaps.

Taking time to do a pulse check on your curiosity, and how you are promoting it within your conference experience, will pay huge dividends over time.

What are some ways you can cultivate a conference culture that embraces curiosity? How do you manage the tensions between participants wanting sessions providing solution-recipes to copy and those providing curiosity-driven, inquiry-based, DIY solutions?