Curiosity Culture offers highly engaging and interactive workshops and presentations ,as well as organisational consulting and professional coaching, designed to cultivate curiosity and grow resiliency.

Workshops

Curiosity Culture offers a wide variety of highly engaging workshops designed to cultivate curiosity and resiliency through a combination of great information and fun – if sometimes challenging – experiential activities. We present workshops in-house, at events, and independently and are able to customize content to suit your needs.

Cultivating Curiosity by Growing Change Resilience

In the face of the radical technological/social transformations of the ‘4th Industrial Revolution’ (AI, 3D-Printing, driverless vehicles, nanotechnology, blockchain, the Internet of Things, etc.) Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity (VUCA) are not the exception, but the norm. Trying to navigate what can feel like a constant storm of change can become personally and organisationally exhausting, bewildering, and demoralising. While curiosity is our most useful aptitude in navigating, as well as initiating, disruptive change, activating and sustaining curiosity requires resilience.

In ‘Cultivating Curiosity by Growing Change Resilience’ we will demonstrate what stress is, how change creates stress, and explore creative attitudes towards stress management. You’ll learn about maintaining an emotional energy balance; increasing your awareness of your limitations, and how to re-energize yourself. You will also learn why curiosity and mindfulness are your best tools in navigating disruptive change, and you will learn actual methods and techniques to activate both and bring them into your everyday life and work.

Participants come away with practical methods and concepts with which they can gain perspective, parry and direct stress, and recharge and refresh in a VUCA world any day and any time.

Curiosity & Disruptive Change

We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another. In its scale, scope, and complexity, the transformation will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before.”  So opens an article by Klaus Schwab, the head of the World Economic Forum, on the Fourth Industrial Revolution.  The flood of significant technological breakthroughs include artificial intelligence and robotics, the Internet of Things, blockchain encryption & currency, autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, energy storage, and quantum computing. Every one of these innovations will have enormous social implications, and will result in great disruption in many many fields of endeavour.

Real disruption is a deep wound to the integrity of organisational identity, so real disruption requires radical adaptation, structural transformation… a transformation in identity. The question that disruption is asking is not ‘what is the problem?’ or ‘how do I survive?’ or ‘how do I make it go away’, the question that disruption is asking is ‘Who are you?’. How you navigate that question determines the path of your evolution. Will you react or respond? Or will you deflect, dismiss, resist, deny or hide? Will you be willing to wrestle with it and, more importantly, with yourself? Will you seek to understand it and, more importantly, seek to understand yourself?

‘Curiosity & Disruptive Change’ focuses on curiosity as the strongest motivation and most useful aptitude for navigating and instigating disruptive change.  The kind of change we will all be experiencing, continuously, in the coming decades.

Find out more about the Curiosity & Disruptive Change workshop.

Navigating the Disruptive Impact of Technology on Organizational Culture

The World Economic Forum – backed by an outpouring of mildly panic stricken white papers from big name organisational consultancies – hails our era as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. We are already riding the rising wave of an increasingly complex fusion of technologies – digital, biological, material, social – which will disrupt, revolutionize and transform almost all spheres of human culture and conduct.  Artificial intelligence, blockchain encryption, genomics, 3D printing, driverless vehicles, ‘the internet of things’, nanotechnology, biotechnology, quantum computing, renewable energy systems; any one of these innovations will have a profound impact on technical, social and organisational structures as we currently know them. The combination of all of them emerging simultaneously is, lightly stated, mind-boggling.We’re entering an era of hyper-complex rapid technological change which will be experienced by most as serial disruption.
How to cope?
How to manage?
How to navigate intelligent pathways through tumult?
What is “technology” anyway?
Why is it so disruptive?
Why is the adoption of a technological solution so problematic?

This workshop will explore these questions. It will introduce what technology is, what change is, what organisational culture is, and discuss the tensions that can occur when you put the three together.  We’ll create maps of your organisations and their competencies, and reflect on how future technology changes will affect these. We’ll go on to demonstrate how technological innovation can be woven into the culture of an organisation through ‘change agency’. Finally, participants will consolidate their learning by navigating a pathway through their own technology challenges.

Find out more about the ‘Change, Culture & Technology’ workshop.

Percussion & Disruption

In the course of this workshop participants learn how to play three rhythmic patterns used in Afro-Cuban music. Afro-Cuban percussion is a rich and complex tradition which is played both in 4/4 time (typical of almost all western music) and in 12/8 time. Participants experience how disruptive bringing rhythmic patterns in different time signatures together is. They then learn and experience how the third very simple rhythmic pattern, called the ‘clave’, is designed to be played in both time signatures and hence serve as a ‘hinge’ or ‘bridge’ across the disruptive forces.

Throughout all points in the workshop the real challenges of learning the parts, and the discomfort and effort of trying to navigate rhythmic disruption, are reflected on in terms of organizational disruption. Participants examine and analyze the range of responses to see the complexity of real reactions to disruption, and through reflecting on the role of the clave participants can apply new insight to navigating disruptive change.

Learn more about the ‘Percussion and Disruption’ workshop.

Cultivating Competence in Curiosity

In this two day workshop you will learn the art and science of curiosity through a two day journey of discovery.

Through storytelling, games and play, change analysis, emotional awareness and perception exercises you will gain an understanding of what curiosity is, and how curiosity can transform overwhelming challenges into invigorating opportunities.

We’ll explore wonder and respect, conceptual bubbles and perception blinders, disruption and hard transitions, habit creation and dissembly, resistance and innovation, and vulnerability and creativity. Through it all you’ll be unearthing your own natural aptitude for ‘following the question’. When asked the right questions exhausting and overwhelming situations which may seem insurmountable reveal themselves to be invigorating opportunities with multiple possible avenues of exploration.

By unleashing your innate capacity for curiosity you are able to face disruptive challenges, corral their potential, and harness their power towards productive change.

Learn more about the ‘Culitvating Competence in Curioisty’ workshop.

Quest-ioning Power

Nabokov wrote that “Curiosity… is insubordination in it’s purest form.”

Why do children stop asking questions when they start attending school?
Why do we sometimes need to say, “There are no stupid questions’?
How does it feel to ask hard questions?
How does it feel to be asked hard questions?
Why is the question ‘why’ so…. uncomfortable?
Why is it so dangerous to be a journalist in a dictatorship?
Why would a government depict the press as ‘the enemy of the people”?
When and where is it safe to ask questions?
Who doesn’t want you to be curious?

Find out more about the Quest-ioning Power workshop.

Workshop Modules

Modules are short activities that can be used alone, or sequenced in any order. Contact us to pick and chose which modules could work together for your team or event.

The Improbability of Being

This brief reflection on how incredibly unlikely it is that we exist at all evokes a couple of the main ingredients of curiosity; wonder and awe (and maybe even gratitude, which is a key attribute of resilience).

Approx. 10 mins

Rules of the Game

Here’s the rules:

Approx. 10 mins

The Curiosity Seeds

We reflect on any one, or all, or some of the following pithy aphorisms:

HOW CAN YOU?

Cultivate opportunities for discovery.
Unleash untapped potential.
Reinvigorate enthusiasm for challenge.
Illuminate pathways to wonder along.
Open up creative possibilities in disruption.
Unlock strength by embracing difference.
Seek questions to follow.

15 – 90 mins

The Respect Seeds

Curiosity without Respect can result in people feeling threatened, and people who feel threatened aren’t able to be curious. So, we reflect on any one, or all, or some of the following pithy aphorisms:

Recognise innate self-determination.
Elicit the instinct for growth.
See others’ perspectives.
Promote open dialogue.
Encourage experimentation & exploration.
Constructively challenge contradictions.
Trust ambiguity together.

15- 90 mins

Hand-ling Change

We pull out the lego, the plastercine, connectors, paper, crayons… whatever’s at hand so that you can use your hands to depict the change challenge you’re currently involved with.

90 – 120 mins

Raven & the First People

An extraordinary Haida creation myth is a rich reflection on disruptive change.

15 – 20 mins

Hidden in Plain Sight

A reflection, with accompanying video, on how what we’re looking for defines what we see, and blinds us to what might be right before our eyes.

10 – 20 mins

Disrupting the Story

A provocative activity featuring a ruse, using a familiar story (usually a fairy tale), which elicits reflections on the capacity to learn, the power of stories, habituation, compliance and authority, and the capacity for improvisation.

60 – 90 mins

Free Word Seeds

Opening up the curiosity palette by free associating to a series of juicy words.

15 mins

Disruption and Dis-chord

Using live music to demo discordance, disruption, and how to bridge dissonance.

15 – 30 mins

Bardo, Apocalypse & Bridges

By delving into the Tibetan Buddhist concept of ‘Bardo’ (the period between death and birth), the Christian concept of ‘Apocalypse’ (cataclysmic revelation), and the ‘Bridges’ change model we reflect on the roles of death, disturbance, grief, uncertainty and discovery in disruptive change.

15 – 30 mins

Curiosity Coaching

Nik Beeson

Curiosity is the most useful aptitude for navigating disruptive change and for initiating transformative change.

My coaching style combines a commitment towards a clear goal with the discovery of core values and meaning.

I root my work with ‘coachees’ in collaboratively following quest-ions to discover goals, values and meaning .  When we are rooted in our core values we can find meaning in what we are involved in and are able to respond, rather than just react, to challenging situations.  When our decisions are rooted in core values meaningful and transformative intentions and projects naturally arise. Inevitably obstacles emerge along the way and these become the sources for building resilience and for cultivating greater awareness, self-understanding and purpose.

My formal coaching education includes Professional Coaching at the Adler Institute, Motivational Interviewing, Dialectical Behaviour Therapy and over 1000 direct counseling hours while a Spiritual Care Resident (Buddhist Chaplain) on the ICU, emergency and neuro wards of the Toronto Western Hospital, as well as completion of Coaching for Change workshops oriented to coaching for organisational change.  My personal experience includes two decades in the constantly transforming and disruptive world of digital communications, facilitation of addiction and mindfulness groups, palliative and hospice care, and as a live-in staff person for the homeless and for folks with mental illness. My university studies (Theology & Ecology) focused on consciousness, addiction and love. Through these varied and rich experiences I have cultivated a compassionate, sophisticated and pragmatic approach to identity, limitation and transformation that I apply to my change work with individuals and organisations.

I look forward very much to working with you!

Please reach out by email at nik@curiosityculture.com

Rich Batchelor

Rich Batchelor has extensive experience working with people to help, support and guide them through maximizing their personal potential and the outcome of their change. He has worked with entrepreneurs and CEO’s, those in career transition and those taking new employment challenges. Using a range of tools to define the challenge and find the right pathway for each individual, the coaching sessions are lively and productive and yes, they even include homework!