My reflections on building a consumer curiosity practice
At the end of 2023, along with my other colleagues, I was set a professional development challenge – to become more curious around the research industry, our clients’ world and/or their customers. This blog series is a reflection on the curiosity techniques I’ve found effective to date in helping me build a curiosity practice.
I am a naturally curious person but when day-to-day work gets busy it’s too easy to become single-minded, narrow in my focus, and lose that connection to what’s happening in the wider world. This challenge was an opportunity to embed curiosity as a habit: a regular practice that prevailed, not a wishful intention that could be blown aside by an incoming client brief.
Developing a regular curiosity practice has increased my confidence. I feel better equipped to bring wider insights and analysis to my clients’ challenges. Whether it’s applying transactional analysis to engaging with estate agents, or Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to deliver better utility services, curiosity enables me to add value to the work I deliver.
Here are some principles that have helped me succeed in my challenge.
Connecting curiosity to my identity
“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become” James Clear
Research on habit building shows that at the heart of behaviour change is identity change. To develop an effective curiosity habit, I had to connect it to the type of person I wanted to be.
The first step in our training was to define our professional identity. Mine is ‘an empathetic explorer of human behaviour’. This set me up for success. It created the parameters for my curiosity practice and meant that every positive action I took from this moment would reinforce my sense of professional self.
Habit stacking
This principle is about linking habits together and I found it a powerful way to introduce new curiosity habits into my daily routine.
The idea is you identify an existing habit and use it as a cue to trigger your new habit. It looks like this: After [current habit], I will [new habit].
Some of mine looked like this:
· After I pour my morning cup of tea, I will search for an interesting podcast episode
· On my journey to work, I will listen to the podcast episode
· After making my lunch on a Friday, I will read three pages of a book
I found the trick was to start small, stacking manageable new habits onto existing ones to ensure they became embedded in my routine.
Knowing the curiosity sources and activities that work for me
Another principle of habit formation is to make it easy. For me this is about engaging in curiosity activities that I naturally enjoy. I love listening to podcasts and reading. I enjoy the flexibility of these activities – either I can get fully immersed in an episode or a book, or dip in and out.
Podcasts and books now form the bedrock of my curiosity practice and help make it feel easy. In contrast, I find it hard to regularly join webinars or attend conferences and trying to force this practice would likely lead to a lapsed habit.
The watchout I found with this principle is not to get too comfortable! For example, the format of podcasts works for me, but I must beware of getting stuck only listening to the same one or two series (therefore becoming too narrow focused again). Instead, at intervals, I return to habit stacking to find new and relevant podcasts for my practice.
On that note, if you have any recommendations for podcasts on human behaviour, I’d love to hear what you’re listening to!
The Customer Closeness Company have a specialist team delivering Customer Curiosity training to our clients. If any of the curiosity practice principles sound interesting to you, get in touch and we can discuss how we can use these principles to help you and your colleagues become more Customer Curious.
