Another tilt at curiosity

I was sitting in a meeting of the trustees for Ako Ōtautahi-Learning City Christchurch, and we were discussing the revised strategic plan. It's a great document, it reflects some fabulous futures thinking that is the bread and butter of Cheryl and the other trustees, and something that I am only slowly learning.

In the course of the discussion I was brought back to a conversation we had a year or more ago where we talked about the place of curiosity. 

Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/life-long-learners/12122901886

I was thinking about this 'provocation': what would you have to do to create a city of curiosity, a place where the population is naturally curious about things? Because if you want a learning city, a city in which learning is 'just the way we are', then you need a city where people generally are just naturally curious

We are more naturally inclined to learn about stuff when we are curious about it, aren't we.  People are of course funny things ('eee there's nought so funny as folks'), so not everyone will be curious at all, and then of course people will be curious about as many different things as there are people. I could say that since curiosity is a naturally occurring characteristic, it will be 'normally' distributed across the population. As difficult as I find it to fathom, yes that must mean that there are those who are hardly curious at all.. hmmmm

So ... curiosity, eh? Defined as "a strong desire to know or learn something", I thought 'how did I create a sense of curiosity in a classroom, or across a whole kura'? By asking cool questions - often, creating and sharing a sense of wonderment and awe (a wee tilt to Art Costa's Habits of Mind), connecting connecting connecting and talking talking talking. That meant telling stories, using humour, being well situated in your own humanity, being real, approachable, respectful.. the characteristics of a good teacher, maybe (and suddenly I am also immersed in Dr Kevin Knight's 8People model).

I stumbled upon an interesting article in Forbes titled "Five Ways To Cultivate Curiosity And Tap Into Your Creativity" by Josh Ritchie (Forbes 15.11.22017). Wut? Curiosity AND creativity? Well there's a surprise. Early on Ritchie makes a great statement:

"Curiosity is the core of all creativity -- the drive to do something better, to experiment, to tinker, to create."

And:

"Curiosity is a strong desire to know or learn something, and it’s important for any professional because it’s required to both improve your skills and figure out how to fix things that don’t work. Without curiosity, you get people doing the same things the same way because “that’s how we’ve always done it.”"

Ritchie posits that there are five key things we need to do (no surprises, the clue was in the article's title):

• Read
• Slow down and take your time
• Practice asking “why?” and other good questions
• Practice saying less (i.e. listen more)
• Hang out with a child

Re-read the list. Go on. Got it? How simple is that? How hard could it be?  I wondered if we could add to that:

• Show how connections can be made between seemingly disparate people and things
• Keep our humanity, and our cultural connection and diversity, to the fore so that we support a culturally safe society

The challenge is how we make these things habits across a city?

We could hold out the hope that a city's leadership could and would do that. I well remember the years when we had Vicki Buck as mayor in Ōtautahi. She did many of these things, she challenged orthodoxy and sparked conversations about how we could do things differently (and still does), but if I can generalise, I don't think that's the norm in civic leadership. I read a great piece by Kaila Colbin this morning in which she addressed the issue of engaging civic leaders. The whole piece is worth reading, but here is the essence of the understanding I took from it:

We couldn’t control whether the politicians showed up. That was not our job. Our job was to put on the most extraordinary, the most kick-ass event we possibly could — and let the politicians fight over themselves to get out in front of the parade.

So we stopped bugging them, and focused instead on curation. We got Hugh Nicholson, Christchurch’s Principal Urban Designer. We got Cameron Sinclair, the founder of Architecture for Humanity.

And then — the pièce de résistance — we got Art Agnos, who had been Mayor of San Francisco during the Loma Prieta earthquake.

All of a sudden, the politicians were, in fact, fighting over themselves to get out in front of the parade. They fought over who got to lead the press conference, who got to open the event, who got to introduce Art himself.

My conclusions are these:

1. A city in which curiosity is 'the way we are', the 'way we do things', will be a city in which creativity thrives and permeates everything
2. Feeding creativity gives more positive wellbeing, social, and economic outcomes
3. If we want a 'curious city, and therefore one in which creativity rulz, there's no point in waiting for others to create it, to lead it. There needs to be a guerilla revolution from within
4. Ako Ōtautahi-Learning City Christchurch is just the organisation to feed, connect, fuel the revolution. 'Ehara taku toa i te toa takitahi, he toa takitini' – my strength is not as an individual, but as a collective. By joining influencers, by nudging, cajoling, talking talking talking, telling stories, by being 'out there', in the faces of the power brokers, we have to make this idea such an attractive proposition that the response would be 'why the hell wouldn't we? Let us in'.

For civic leaders, I often have a sense of a lack of moral imperative. The only outcomes that seem to be valued are those that can be valued directly, in the short term, with dollars. We have a plague, a pandemic, of short term'ism (and have done for a very long time). I sense that there seems often to be an inability to understand that when people experience higher levels of wellbeing, they are generally economically more productive too.

Surely it's a no brainer to do whatever we can to foster curiosity, and therefore creativity? And anyway, what the heck are civic leaders there for?