HOW TO SPARK CURIOSITY.
Without curiosity, human civilisation simply couldn’t have advanced. There’d be no penicillin without Jennings’ poking mould in a Petri dish, no moon landing without generations staring into the stars, and probably no advancements in workplace safety without someone mildly obsessing over why their workers kept getting injured.
We collaborate with many safety leaders who have that same curiosity — the appetite to find out exactly what people go through and how to use this data to improve the overall safety and wellbeing of their teams.
This curiosity drives a safety leader to explore the rise in incidents in the warehouse on a Friday afternoon, or to unpack why people aren’t properly logging near-miss incidents into the management systems. And it’s the same curiosity that can help safety messaging and initiatives cut through the noise.
But what’s going on here?
Well, it’s quite simple really. On an individual level, there’s a lot we know and even more that we don’t. The gap between these two states is what American economist George Loewenstein called the curiosity gap. And we just can’t help but seek to fill this gap.
As communicators, we can use that to our advantage. With curiosity, we can make safety learning, training and communications stand out from the rest of the internal communications in your business.
How? Well, here are just a few ideas from our favourite tome, How to Speak Human (yes, the one written by our Founders, Jen Jackson and Dougal Jackson).
Make it incomplete
Drip feed or tease people with small amounts of information to keep them intrigued (and please, good news only with this idea). Use puzzles or quizzes and allow people to get curious about filling in the blanks.
Make it novel
Consider how you’ve done safety communication and learning in the past and deliberately do something different. Use a new channel, medium or style with your safety communication or learning. For example, always do online learning? Then maybe it’s time for a face-to-face experience.
Make it intriguing
Questions always get us curious, inspiring us to come up with our own answers and create connections with others. Consider a teaser phase in every safety campaign — asking questions (either literal or rhetorical) before your official launch.
Make it unpredictable
While we love workplace rituals and traditions, try mixing them up once in a while by changing the format or style.
If you want to introduce some curiosity into your safety communications and learning, we HIGHLY recommend avoiding these pitfalls.
Letting the curiosity phase drag on without ending. We all want to see things wrapped up in a good time (not a long time).
Promise something delightful — and deliver it! Manage your team’s expectations by doing what you say.
Make sure everyone feels capable of participating in the promised experience. Failure or the prospect of failure will kill interest.
Looking for some curious inspiration in the world of safety? Project Graham made for the Victorian Government Transport and Accident Commission’s Toward Zero initiative hits in all sorts of curious ways.
