The curiosity economy with Nancy Nouaimeh

Answers are everywhere now, but strong leadership is getting harder. When information is abundant, the real advantage shifts to something upstream: the quality of the questions we ask, the connections we make across disciplines, and the humility to admit we do not know yet. I share a reflective, solo perspective on why curiosity may become more valuable than expertise in the years ahead, and how that changes the way we lead, learn, and build organizations that can adapt.

We dig into the hidden limitation of expertise: the more experienced we are, the easier it is to fall into shortcuts that once worked but now quietly mislead us. I connect curiosity to organizational excellence and quality management, including continuous improvement, scientific thinking, and the difference between mechanical compliance and living inquiry. We also talk about what curious professionals do differently, from listening longer to seeking diverse perspectives, and how one good question can shift a team from defending positions to exploring possibilities with more psychological safety.

Then we bring it into the age of AI. If AI can generate answers instantly, our edge becomes asking deeper questions, evaluating what is right or wrong, and crossing boundaries to learn from other fields. I also share the idea of a “curiosity portfolio” and a practical summer invitation: choose one curiosity question and let it travel with you without turning rest into a productivity project.

If this sparks something, subscribe, share the episode with a colleague, and leave a review. What is the one question you want to live with this season?

Transcript

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Welcome And The Big Claim

Nancy Nouaimeh 0:19

Hello, and welcome to Excellence Foresight, where we explore the ideas and shifts shaping the future of leadership, quality, excellence, and organizational performance. I'm Nancy Noine. I'm your host for this podcast. I work with organizations and leaders across different sectors and countries, helping them strengthen their systems, improve performance, develop their people, and build cultures of sustainable excellence. In this podcast about the curiosity economy, I do not want to simply react to what's trending. I want to look a little bit further ahead. I want to ask what today's changes may mean for how we lead, how we learn, how we make decisions, and how we create value in the years to come. Today's episode is a reflective one. It's a solo one. It comes from what I have been observing, testing, and learning in my own work and with my clients. Today's episode, Why Curiosity May Become More Valuable Than Expertise, may sound like a provocative statement. Expertise has always mattered and would always will. I have spent my career building expertise, learning from experts, and working with professionals whose knowledge and experience are extraordinary. But I'm increasingly convinced that expertise alone will not be enough for the future. In this world where answers are becoming easier to access, the ability to ask better questions may become one of the most valuable capabilities we have. And this is what we teach in all the classes we give and all the master classes and workshops we deliver. That's what I mean by the curiosity economy. It's an economy where value is created not only by what we know, by how we're willing to explore what we do not know yet. And that will make a big difference for us. Why curiosity matters now? It has always been important, but today it's becoming really essential. We live in a world of accelerating change, technology is evolving very quickly, industries

Why Curiosity Matters Right Now

Nancy Nouaimeh 2:18

are converging, and work is being redesigned in many forms. Expectations are changing, everybody's expectations. The boundaries between disciplines are becoming less clear. And we see this with our kids, with the specializations they're doing. In that kind of environment, fixed knowledge ages quickly. And I'm experiencing this in the masters I'm doing now. It's a master's in digital tools for businesses. And I see how knowledge needs really to shift to understanding these technologies and understanding how to live and work with these technologies. What we learned 10 years ago may still be valuable, but it may no longer be sufficient. And the question is not only what do I know, the question that we should be asking is how quickly can I learn? How widely can I explore? And how well can I connect ideas from different places? My strength has been since I started my career is being able to connect different ideas, to shape different solutions. And that's what the future will need is looking at how ideas of people within a workplace can be put together to provide something unique, to provide a unique solution, to provide something that the world doesn't have yet. Curiosity is what enables that. Curiosity keeps us open, it keeps us learning, and it prevents expertise from becoming a closed room. And that's what I need you to think about. How to make your expertise valuable in the future. Expertise, though, has a hidden limitation. It is powerful, but expertise also has a shadow side. The more we know, the more we may believe we always understand. The more experience we have, the more tempting it becomes to interpret new situations through old patterns. And Einstein said, we cannot sort out the problems of today with the mindset that created them. So we have to change our mindset to be able to create new solutions. This is natural. The human brain, like shortcuts, experience gives us shortcuts. Many of them are useful, but in times of change, shortcuts can become traps. We may see a familiar problem where something new is emerging. We may apply a familiar solution where a different approach is needed. Curiosity is needed. It interrupts that automatic response. It helps us ask, what is different here? What am I not seeing? What if my usual explanation is incomplete? What could I learn from another field, from another culture, from another generation, another profession? I believe diversity is richness. And having curiosity with diversity is the thing to move forward in the future. In that sense, I we should not consider curiosity as a soft skill. It's very, very strategic. This podcast is about excellence. So let me try to put together curiosity and excellence and

The Hidden Trap Of Expertise

Nancy Nouaimeh 5:08

see what comes up. Curiosity sits at the heart of excellence for me. It is very important. Continuous improvement begins with dissatisfaction with the current state, right? But it also begins with curiosity about what could be better. We have to question, we have to have an open mind to do things better and look at it from a curiosity point of view. Scientific thinking we teach in the Shiva model is about curiosity. It makes things, uh, it makes curiosity a discipline. Learning organizations should be built on curiosity. They are built on curiosity. Innovation is curiosity applied to possibilities. So curiosity in this sense is very, very important for excellence and it really sits at its heart. When people stop being curious, improvement becomes mechanical. We apply tools, we just ask questions, we try to find out solutions, but all mechanical. There's no spark in it. When we follow routines, we conduct reviews, we fill templates, we run workshops. That's good, but it doesn't really make the difference. The spirit of inquiry disappears when we are very disciplined. I'm saying this, I'm very conscious of what I'm saying. I come from a standardization background. Standardization is needed. But we should leave room for curiosity, for excellence to take its place. When inquiry disappears, excellence becomes a labor rather than a living practice. And we want excellence to live in organizations, in the work we're doing. The best organization I have seen are curious organizations. Individuals are curious. They apply scientific thinking. They ask why, they ask why not. And it's very important to make the distinction between what we shouldn't do and what we do, what we can do, but also what we shouldn't do sometimes or what we are not doing sometimes, it's what makes a difference. What we aren't making, what can we make differently? Organizations, excellent organizations, focus on customer experience. And we ask our employees to know what the leaders are not hearing through the customer voices. That's a very good field to tap into when we want to look at things differently. We ask about the data, what the data hides. We ask about the systems,

Curiosity As A Core Of Excellence

Nancy Nouaimeh 7:23

what the systems are telling us. All these should spark new questions for us to look at things differently. And that's what makes excellence. Curious professionals do things differently. What do they do? They behave differently. One of the things I've noticed is that curious people they listen longer. They listen, they try to understand, they do not rush to answers, they try to connect the dots, they try to connect unhidden messages. They are comfortable saying, I do not know yet. I need to ask questions, I need to learn more. They seek diverse perspectives. I mentioned diversity already. Diversity is key is richness. You need to listen to different points of view and analyze and try to get to the best solution. Curious people, they need outside their field. They connect fields together. They learn from younger people, from other sectors, from mistakes, from customers, from frontline teams. They're not threatened by not knowing. Not knowing is not a weakness for curious people. This is what we call also growth mindset. They're energized by it. That's a really powerful mindset, a mindset that's open to see things, to learn new things, to understand new things, and to connect the dots. I often notice that the most effective leaders are not always the ones who speak first, and we hear it also in a lot of discussions. They're often the ones who ask the questions that changes the conversation, shifts the direction. A good question can open a system, it can reveal assumptions, and it can create psychological safety also for people. I'm working with one of my new clients, and the key things for us is to really focus on establishing psychological safety first to change the culture. It can move a team from defending positions to exploring possibilities. It's all about asking the right question. Curiosity in the age of AI, it's very important. AI can provide answers quickly, but then our advantage moves upstream to the quality of the questions we ask. Everyone may have access to answers, it's easy. Not everyone will have the curiosity to ask deeper, wider, and more meaningful questions and spend time understanding the answers of the AI and trying to see what's right and what's wrong and what direction to take. This is why I believe curiosity may

How Curious Leaders Behave

Nancy Nouaimeh 9:38

become more valuable than expertise in some contexts. Not because expertise will disappear, it won't, but because curiosity determines how expertise evolves. A curious expert grows, but a non-curious one will not. A curious leaders will adapt. A non-curious one will protect the past. I believe in protecting the past, I believe of learning from the past, but we need to move forward. And a curious organization will learn. Curious organizations will evolve. They will standardize yesterday's success, but should not leave it to become a weakness. They will focus on the future, on the learning. Curiosity is where new ideas also come from. Some of the most valuable insights do not come from looking harder inside our own fields. They come from crossing boundaries, and there are plenty of examples out there. Quality can learn from psychology, leadership can learn from ecology, project management can learn from emergency responses. What we learn from the Formula One, for example, for quality is invaluable. That's speed and applying it to different other sectors is very important. Education can learn from design. We use design thinking in education. Operations can learn from healthcare. There's a lot of examples, if you look out there, that talks to these cross-domain learning, and it's very important. When we benchmark, we don't necessarily benchmark in our own field. Consulting can learn from the community work, and I've done many of many community work, and that's an exchange. So we learn from any field, we learn from anything we see in front of us. The smart thing is to try to look at how that could be adapted to our field

AI Makes Questions The Advantage

Nancy Nouaimeh 11:23

and how we take different ideas from different fields and put them together to give a great unique solution. The future appears at the intersection of disciplines. This is what we're seeing now in a lot of industries. This is why I encourage leaders and professionals to have what I call a curiosity portfolio. Not only professional development in the narrow sense, but exposure to different ideas, people, and environments. I gave my CV to my husband once to check. Said, wow, you've done so many different things. Maybe it's hard for someone to see your expertise, but you've got a blended experience, which is very rich for any organization. This is what it's important now and in the future is to have that portfolio, to have these different experiences, different environments. Like I said, diversity is richness. Diversity of our experience is richness. Conversations are also very important to learn from others. I do encourage benchmarking. I encourage visits across sectors. I've done plenty of that work. And I encourage everyone to look beyond their field to learn for the future. This is a summer episode. I wanted it to be short. And I want to make this very practical and light for everyone. Summer usually is a wonderful season for curiosity. Weather is beautiful. I'm here in Dublin. It's sunny. It's good to sit outside. And this is the time, the best time to think, to think about new ideas, to think about new things and new projects, new products. We don't turn to holidays into productivity projects, that's not the point. But it's good to give a little distance from our routine, which helps usually to think differently.

Cross-Discipline Learning And Benchmarking

Nancy Nouaimeh 13:04

So here's a simple invitation. This summer choose one curiosity question. Don't think about performance. Don't think about your goals, not a task, just a question. Look about something you want to look, you want to do differently. For example, for me, I can look at what nature teaches me about resilience. I look about travel, my travels, my trips, what systems I see. What do they teach me also? How can I make how can I look at this sense differently? Very important, I think, question to keep asking ourselves. What am I curious about but have never made time to explore? And try to see what you can learn from that for your work and to establish excellence in your own work and your team and your organization. Let the question travel with you. You do not need to answer immediately. Sometimes the value of a question is that it keeps our attention open. The curiosity economy, this is what the episode was about, is not about abandoning expertise. It's about keeping expertise alive. It's about recognizing that what we know matters, that what we are willing to learn may matter even more. In a world where answers are increasingly available to everyone through AI and

Build A Curiosity Portfolio This Summer

Nancy Nouaimeh 14:18

other tools, curiosity becomes a differentiator. And I do believe that. It shapes how we ask questions, the connections we make, the assumptions we challenge, and the futures we imagine. Perhaps the future will belong less to those who know the most and more to those who never stop learning, less to those who defend certainty, and we need to move beyond just working within a certain environment. There's uncertainty everywhere. And more to those who remain open, less to those who repeat what worked before, and more to those who are willing to explore what may be needed next. We're talking about the foresight, about the future. We need to focus on what we can do next. Thank you for joining me on the Excellence Foresight. I'm Nancy Naimi. Until next time, stay curious, keep learning, continue shaping excellence for the future, and enjoy your summer.