Lead with Curiosity: Curiosity Needs a Cutoff Point
Article 14 in the Leadership in Real Life Series.
Jennifer Youngblood
7/26/20262 min read
I said last week that I was closing out this series on curiosity. Then this idea wouldn’t leave me alone all week, which is a pretty good example of the very thing it’s about: good ideas don’t wait for a convenient moment to show up.
Curiosity is what makes a good leader ask for other people’s ideas, and stay open to their own, even after they think they’re done thinking. That openness is the whole reason this series exists. But openness has a practical downside. If you’re genuinely open to ideas, you get more of them than you can use, sometimes from the group, sometimes from yourself, right when you thought a decision was close.
I’ve watched this happen most in reorganizations. Someone suggests renaming a unit. Someone else has a better structure. A third idea shows up right when you thought you were nearly done. A working group that should have wrapped weeks ago is still fielding new proposals. I’ve done it to myself too, generating one more possibility exactly when we needed to decide.
I first heard how fighter pilots handle this from a colleague with a military background. I was telling him about a team drowning in good ideas on something we needed to close out, people still tossing in new suggestions when the product was nearly final.
He mentioned that pilots set a hard deadline during mission planning: a cutoff after which no new ideas enter the plan, even brilliant ones.
They don't stop because the ideas are getting crappy. They stop because the goal of planning isn't more ideas. The goal is to make a decision.
I looked into it, read a book by a fighter pilot who walked through it, and then started using it myself. Sometimes I told people I was using it, sometimes I just used it quietly, in my own head, as the point where I stopped taking new input.
That solved half the problem. The other half showed up when the good ideas didn’t run out, and just didn’t fit together. A mentor gave me that piece of the solution, talking about the same working-group hazard: too many good ideas, some from the group, some from me. She compared it to shoes in a closet. You can love every pair you own and still only pack two or three for a trip. The rest don’t get thrown out. They wait in their boxes for the trip that calls for them.
Combining the two ideas changed how I ran that kind of work. An idea shows up after the deadline? Good, we’ll hold it for the next time something like this comes up. Two good ideas that don’t fit together? One goes on the shelf, not in the trash, ready when its moment comes.
Staying curious doesn’t mean staying open forever. It means asking, listening, and then knowing when you’ve asked enough. That is not shutting curiosity down. It is giving the work enough structure to move forward.
Set the deadline. Protect the ideas you don’t use instead of losing them.
Leadership in Real Life: Lead with Curiosity
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