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Curiosity: Nice to Have or fundamental for our projects?

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Gwenola Michaud
Community Champion
Project Manager & Advisor| Geosciences & Monitoring Consulting Milano, Italy

Curiosity is often seen as a “nice to have” in project teams—but in practice, it is a driver of better decisions and risk reduction.

Curiosity grows when it is actively encouraged, not just valued: making space for questions, rewarding challenges, and linking learning to outcomes.

At the same time, curiosity can be difficult to maintain under delivery pressure.

How do you create an environment where curiosity is not seen as slowing things down, but as strengthening delivery?
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Lissette Indhira Pimentel Sosa
Community Champion
Program Manager| HARPER SRL Santo Domingo / Distrito Nacional, Dominican Republic
Most issues I’ve seen in projects come from assumptions that were never questioned. Curiosity helps surface those early.
What helps is keeping it practical, asking the right questions at the right time, not turning it into long discussions that slow things down.
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DAVID MARSHALL QATAR ENERGY Doha, DA, Qatar
Most project they just use the past lessons learned.
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Luis Branco CEO| Business Insight, Consultores de Gestão, Ldª Carcavelos, Lisboa, Portugal
I believe curiosity is far more than a “nice to have” in projects. In complex and fast-changing environments, it becomes a protective mechanism against assumptions, blind spots, and premature decisions.

In practice, many project failures do not happen because teams lacked effort or delivery capability.
They happen because important questions were never explored early enough.

At the same time, curiosity only survives in environments where people feel psychologically safe to question, challenge, and learn without being perceived as slowing delivery down.

One of the most effective approaches I have seen is linking curiosity directly to decision quality, risk reduction, and learning outcomes.
When teams understand that thoughtful questioning prevents rework, improves alignment, and strengthens execution, curiosity stops being viewed as a delay and starts being recognized as part of disciplined delivery itself.

An excellent and very relevant reflection for project leaders.
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Eduard Hernandez
Community Champion
Product Operations Program Manager Barcelona, Cataluña, Spain
Throughout history, essential inventions derived from curiosity. It is important to foster an environment that incentivizes curiosity, and this is possible in a psycholgically safe setting. As a PM, we must ensure that our team members feel safe enough to think outside the box. As with everything else, balance is key. Curiosity cannot negatively impact the project progress or add additional unnecessary risks.
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Imran Afzal Cary, NC, United States
Curiosity becomes fundamental the moment a project moves beyond predictable execution.

Most delivery failures I’ve seen were not caused by lack of process or effort. They came from teams stopping their inquiry too early:

  • assumptions going unchallenged
  • weak signals being ignored
  • risks normalized over time
  • metrics interpreted at face value instead of investigated
“Lessons learned” are valuable, but they only help if teams remain curious enough to ask whether the current environment still resembles the past.

In practice, curiosity is not about endless exploration or slowing delivery down. It is about improving organizational sensing:

  • asking better questions earlier
  • understanding why signals are changing
  • challenging false alignment
  • detecting issues before they become escalations
That only happens in environments where questions are treated as contributions to delivery rather than resistance to it.

The balance is important, of course. Curiosity without execution discipline creates drift. But execution without curiosity creates fragility — especially in complex projects where conditions, stakeholders, and constraints evolve faster than reporting structures do.

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