Curiosity makes listening easy. Being curious helps me seek out new opportunities to develop and grow, keeping me challenged and energised. It feeds my business and my drive to keep going, delivering and moving forward. Curiosity is what led me to running my own web development business after taking a redundancy from a newspaper job. Along with a a frustration borne of using websites that had chernobyl level user experience, curiosity and a slightly naive self confidence helped me learn to develop websites and become a business owner.

Curiosity is what allows me to deliver what clients need, to ensure they are delivering what their clients and customers need.

One of the most valuable pieces of advice I’ve heard in my work as a designer is ‘You don’t take a brief under exam conditions.’ To translate – it’s only through asking questions and getting answers that you truly understand what another needs.

I have expertise, which is why clients have come to me, but my expertise doesn’t take preference over their need. Curiosity helps me build trust and deliver work in a way that I find most rewarding – as a collaboration and partnership that comes from the right questions, the right analysis, the right outcome and active listening. My clients are the experts in what they need and what their clients and customers need. Together the we take the journey to the solution.

Reasons to be curious in business and service provision:

1. Better performance: fewer errors, wasted effort, restarts and dead ends
2. Avoiding ‘confirmation bias’: the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs or theories, or, the tendency for a web developer to think, ‘I know what you need’, without taking the time to enquire and discuss.
3. It builds trust: asking the right questions, active listening and delivering solutions based on agreed issues and outcomes is what is needed in service delivery.
4. Less chance of conflict and disappointment
5. Greater chance of happiness and an outcome that exceeds expectations.
6. It keeps us learning about new practices, better efficiencies, technologies, ways of doing things and ways of being.

Want to find out what are your deep drivers and values? My Brand Lab workshop does just that. Book a call below to see how a values based brand can help you grow your audience, increase engagement, broadcast your message to a wider range.