🧐 A fundamental change in thinking that will help you make more impact than anything when working with change and it's free!

A boat somewhere between Flores and Komodo islands during the night. Indonesia, 2022. © Marcin Konkel . All rights reserved.

One of the greatest, world renown Polish reporters of all time, Ryszard Kapuściński, wrote in "Travels with Herodotus":

“We do not really know what draws a human being out into the world. Is it curiosity? A hunger for experience? An addiction to wonderment? The man who ceases to be astonished is hollow, possessed of an extinguished heart. If he believes that everything has already happened, that he has seen it all, then something most precious has died within him—the delight in life.”

This is one of the most profound quotes that I have known and re-read frequently through the years.

I see it also resonating a ton with the number one trait when working with transitions which is:

👉🏼 Curiosity

Few examples:

• what pushes people to do things the way they do?

• what are we not seeing that might give us more options?

• how do the unspoken rules in place create more of behaviours X, Y, Z?

• how can we deliver more of the right things while reducing team tension?

📌 These are some of the hundreds of questions one can ask by being curious. All of them:

• show genuine interest

• respect that people made the best decisions they could at the time

• help in understanding the context

• open minds to listening rather than advising

🎁 This sense of wonderment nourishes a mindset being in constant discovery.

If we start with an end in mind, a fixed state, we lose out on the journey. A journey that can bring much more valuable insights or directions than initially planned. Knowing the context helps you not to copy practices or tools from other companies but rather fit them in the right scenario or create your own frameworks.

🗺️ Context = culture, business environment, client’s needs, software architecture etc.

Stop addressing changes as if you know everything or have seen it all. There might and will be patterns that happen repeatedly, but they are in a different mix and in another context.

🤩 Build your wonderment by:

• listening to individual stories

• getting to know the context, product and clients

• quitting toxic cultures 

• running experiments in your professional and private life

🧯Curiosity does not need a certification or a fancy course. It’s free and comes from within. In the end, we build our quality of life through the quality of our thoughts. Would you like to live with an extinguished heart?

—

There is a shorter version of the above quote that resonates to me in similar fashion. It comes from my mentor on reportage photography, a former National Geographic photographer, Tomasz Tomaszewski:

“Among many, there are two perspectives through which you can look at the world. The former is to live like nothing is a miracle. The latter is as if everything is one.”

I definitely try to nourish the latter option remaining in awe by what I see in the world and in people I meet. I fail a ton but when I don’t, these are one of the best moments I later cherish.