A few years ago in relation to my role, I was informed I had to be professionally curious. My assessment and management plan needed to include this skill especially when safeguarding children and vulnerable adults.
Professional curiosity is commonly cited in serious case reviews, regulatory inspections and now included as a core skill in many roles but currently there is no clear definition of what this means.
In safeguarding, professional curiosity includes not accepting information at face value, seeking further information, disguised compliance and our assessment needs to consider if we have normalised behaviours and chaos, attributed exceptional crisis situations as appropriate actions and the presence of people as protective.
Burton V and Revell L wrote ‘Professional Curiosity in Child Protection: Thinking the Unthinkable in a NeoLiberal World’ where being professionally curious was critical to risk assessment and risk management.
How to Practice Curiosity and How Does This Overlap with Continuing Professional Development
Professional curiosity has also been aligned to a growth mindset and active open-mindedness.
People with curiosity have a desire to explore, learn and understand.
As such, they are flexible in their thinking and recognise that there may be different ways of doing things from what they have always done and are willing to explore different options.
This requires:
- Self-awareness to be able to critically evaluate ourselves and understand our own minds
- Persistence to pursue and explore information verifying it to ascertain its validity
- Active listening and asking questions
- Being analytical to identify and define a specific problem, gathering key information from a range of sources to develop a deeper understanding and include different confirmatory evidence – triangulation
- Critical thinking to enable weighing up evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction and identify solutions
In addition, we need to consider the wider perspective of others and how they weight and frame the same evidence. Individuals will interpret information differently through their lens of culture, heritage and identity, alongside appreciation of context and the influence of power.
Utilising the skills above correlate with continuing professional development and learning journeys.
Our Learning Journeys should be Built From Curiosity
When we create our own learning journey, we become masters of self-initiative and self-motivation and through reflection and reflexivity, understand and become skilled.
We can identify our own learning goals, identify resources for learning and create personal learning pathways.
Group and connection with others is important to consider as part of our learning journey. This builds self esteem, self-confidence, social communication, greater sharing and wisdom.
Organisational Training Needs Analysis should also be Built From Curiosity
Organisations, should be self-motivated and through organisational reflection, become thought leaders creating a learning community.
Their training needs analysis should be identified from their own experience of being an organisation and create a unique footprint of learning.
Where environments encourage competencies and compliance, they inadvertently discourage curiosity and exploration.
Our organisations should be curious to understand theories that help to make sense of their purpose, social need, disproportionality, effective use of resources and assist in decision-making especially in relation to taking risks where there is uncertainty.
Our Challenge is to Increase Curiosity in Those Around Us?
We need to ask questions:
- What’s the best way to challenge long-held views?
- When was the last time you changed your mind?
- What makes you say that?
- You have said that a few times, what does that mean to you?
- Please explain that to me?
- What evidence supports this?
- How else could you look at this?
- What are the positives and negatives of this viewpoint?
- How might someone else see this differently?
- What could happen as a result … and how would that impact on you and others?
Curiosity helps people explore new ideas, take risks, and adapt to change.
Models of supervision, through diverse groups creating distributed wisdom utilising mechanisms to create curiosity are critical going forward.
Nurture Health and Care Ltd has developed a new model of supervision to bridge this gap and make curiosity a priority.
“Curiosity is the engine of achievement” – Sir Ken Robinson.
