The importance of Curiosity

Before I started my PhD, I spent the best part of a year doing a deep dive into the value and impact of curiosity as part of my work with ReCreate. What a fortuitous induction into how best to conduct research!

Being curious is probably the number one requirement.

However, curiosity can also lead to rabbit-holes, which are not always very helpful when trying to be productive. To counteract this and attempt to positively harness my curiosity, I created an ‘I wonder if’ notebook. Here, I record all my questions so I can look back on them later. I now have pages and pages of ‘I wonder if’ questions:

• I wonder, does the nature of the product or service the social enterprise is selling have an impact on scaling?

• I wonder does the type of impact the social enterprise is having make a difference?

• I wonder how big a role the use of the technology has on the scaling of a social enterprise?

You get the picture, the list goes on. I wonder a lot!

Occasionally, there is a small glimpse of magic when the dots join up and I see a glimmer of the big picture. Not all growth is scaling—lightbulb moment! Scaling impact is not the same as scaling the organisation—another lightbulb moment! It seems obvious, but chances are that your social enterprise is growing, which is different to intentionally scaling.

Not all social enterprises can or should scale, but perhaps they feel they should.

Many social enterprises operate a hybrid funding/finance model. Attracting that all important funding often requires new programmes. Scaling requires considerable planning. You must evaluate if your organisation is ready to scale, or if there are further fundamental building blocks that need to be put in place. I recently came across an interesting quote by Bill Clinton (I assure you not my usual source of quotes!) that really resonated with me:

“Nearly every problem has been solved by someone somewhere. The challenge of the 21st Century is to find out what works and scale it up.”