You can't always train someone to be curious

But you can design it out of them, and a lot of workplace learning does exactly that.

Think about how most change lands at work. It's pushed. This is happening, here's the deadline, here's the module, tick it off by Friday. Push gets you compliance. It rarely gets you commitment.

People do the minimum the mandate requires and slide back to the old way the moment no one's watching.

Curiosity is the opposite. It's a pull. People move toward a new way of working when they want to know what's on the other side: when it answers a question they already have or solves a problem they can feel.

Think about the last thing you genuinely changed about how you work: a tool, a habit, a way of running a meeting. Chances are no one made you. You hit the limits of the old way, got curious about a better one, and went looking. That's pull. Nobody had to enforce it.

You can't mandate that wanting, but you can design for it.

It usually means resisting the urge to lead with the answer. Instead of opening with the policy, you drop someone into a situation where the old way falls short and let them feel it. The gap between what they just did and what they should have done is where curiosity lives. That's the moment they lean in, because now they want the better way.

Get that right and people don't just finish the training; they go looking for the thing it's teaching. Most change asks people to comply. The change that sticks makes them curious first. One you can mandate. The other you must design.

Jen