With change and disruption becoming the norm, most organizations are doubling down on certainty. They’re tightening controls, sharpening directives and rewarding leaders who can project the most confidence. It feels logical, but it’s often exactly the wrong instinct.

The leaders who navigate disruption most effectively aren’t the ones with all the answers. They’re the ones who stay genuinely curious about what’s shifting, what their teams are experiencing and what might be possible if they looked at the problem from a different perspective.

Curiosity is now a core leadership skill that’s more in demand than ever. And it might be the most underdeveloped one in your organization.

What Curiosity Really Is — And Isn’t

In learning and development (L&D) circles, we talk a lot about growth mindset and psychological safety. Curiosity sits at the intersection of both, but it’s more active than mindset and more personal than culture.

Curiosity is the deliberate choice to stay open when your instinct says to pick a lane and charge forward. It’s asking, “What don’t I understand yet?” before acting. It’s treating uncertainty as data, not danger.

Curiosity isn’t enthusiasm, optimism or an absence of urgency. Some of the most curious leaders I’ve worked with inside the most cautious organizations were also the most focused and decisive. Curiosity didn’t slow them down; it made their decisions sharper because they were grounded in facts rather than assumptions.

Why Curiosity Is a Leadership Imperative Right Now

In a survey of around 3,000 employees across industries, Harvard Business School researcher Francesca Gino found that only 24% said they felt curious at work on a regular basis, and 70% said they faced barriers to asking more questions. Gino’s research also found that 92% of employees see positive outcomes when curiosity is encouraged, including more new ideas, higher job satisfaction and stronger performance.

Yet, many organizations are systematically suppressing curiosity by demanding certainty from their leaders, rewarding speed over reflection and treating deviation from the plan as a problem to fix. Leaders say they value inquisitive minds, but in their day-to-day roles, most stifle curiosity, fearing it will increase risk and inefficiency.

The result is organizations that look decisive from the outside but are flying blind on the inside. Transformations stall when leaders stop actively asking the questions that would tell them what’s truly happening. Engagement drops when people learn their curiosity isn’t welcome.

Korn Ferry research found that learning agility and curiosity are now the top priorities for the world’s most admired companies when hiring for leadership roles. Those organizations understand that under conditions of constant change, the ability to continue learning matters more than the ability to project certainty.

3 Tools to Help Leaders Redevelop Curiosity

To help leaders redevelop curiosity, incorporate these three tools into your leadership development efforts.

1. Replace the briefing with a question.

Most leaders open meetings by telling. Try opening by asking instead. Not “Here’s the plan,” but “Before I share my thinking, what are you seeing on the ground that I might not be?” One question, asked consistently, changes the information flow in a team. Leaders who do this stop making decisions in a data vacuum, and their teams start to feel more heard, appreciated and brought into the process sooner.

2. Schedule time with discomfort.

Curious leaders deliberately expose themselves to perspectives that challenge their current view. That might mean spending time with frontline teams during a transformation, reading the detailed feedback that didn’t make it into the overview slide or asking a trusted peer to play devil’s advocate on a decision that’s already been made. Comfort narrows thinking, while friction expands it. Building curiosity means making friction a feature, not a bug, in the process of getting to a richer outcome.

3. Normalize “I don’t know yet.”

The culture of a team reflects the behaviors of its leader. If leaders perform certainty when they don’t have it, they signal that admitting uncertainty is a weakness that won’t be tolerated or rewarded. The consequence: information gets filtered so only good news makes it upwards, problems get managed sideways and blamed on someone else, and leaders operate on an increasingly distorted picture of reality. Leaders who model “I don’t know yet; let’s find out together” create teams that do the same. And teams that stay curious stay adaptive in times of disruption, when they need that adaptability the most.

What It Costs to Underestimate the Power of Curiosity

Curiosity often becomes visible only after its absence has cost the team something. You don’t get a notification when a leader stopped asking questions six months ago. You see it in the transformation that lost pace; the talent that resigned; the strategy that was built on assumptions no one stress-tested and that backfired when it met the reality of the organization.

In that sense, curiosity is a risk management tool. Leaders who stay genuinely open to what they don’t know are less likely to be blindsided and more likely to build teams that can hold complexity without freezing.

The organizations winning right now aren’t necessarily the ones with the best strategy. They’re the ones with the most learning happening per unit of time. And curiosity is the leadership skill that helps accelerate that.