Over six months, Rider Levett Bucknall (RLB UK), invited built environment experts from outside of our business, as well as voices from beyond construction, including individuals from communications, fashion and entrepreneurship backgrounds, to explore curiosity, creativity and innovation. What has emerged is a clear lesson: we need to allow space for curiosity and creativity to empower innovation.
Curiosity creates the conditions for learning, growth and genuine understanding. It encourages us to interrogate problems properly rather than rushing to familiar solutions. Einstein is often quoted as saying that if he had an hour to solve a problem, he would spend most of it understanding the question.
Crucially, curiosity is closely linked to something some professionals may not think of as important in a work environment: vivacity. Not the forced fun of awkward icebreakers, but permission to explore, experiment and think differently. Making space for playful energy in the workplace allows people to challenge assumptions and surface tacit knowledge. When people enjoy the process, the insights sticks long after the brainstorming has ended and the whiteboard has been wiped.
Hold on creativity
Somewhere between childhood and professional life, creativity becomes sidelined. We start to equate being “creative” with a narrow set of roles such as designers, artists, innovators, and forget that creativity is a fundamental human capability. Many technically brilliant professionals like surveyors, engineers and lawyers have never been encouraged to “think with their hands” or explore ideas without knowing the outcome in advance.
 |
Get our essential weekday HR news and updates.
|
This matters because creativity underpins innovation, and innovation depends on being allowed to fail. While intellectually, we may accept that experimentation involves things not working first time. Culturally, we rarely reward it.
That bravery is a leadership issue, not an individual one. Curiosity is not just personal; it is cultural. It requires organisations to reframe failure as a teacher rather than a threat, and to protect creativity as “real work” rather than something squeezed in around it as bonus.
We are also still operating within a legacy model of work that assumes ideas arrive between nine and five, seated at a desk. In reality, creativity thrives in motion and in different environments and when the mind is allowed to wander. Creativity is deeply environmental, and organisations need to facilitate space literal and metaphorical for it to happen.
Stay curious
Diversity plays a critical role here. If creativity is about seeing differently, equality is about ensuring the “different” is actually in the room. When we bring together people with different backgrounds, generations and ways of processing the world, we expand the creative palette.
People are no longer motivated by hierarchy or command and control instructions. It’s not about defending your position, but, instead, building frameworks for creativity, systems for reward, and cultures where experimentation is not just permitted but celebrated.
Great leaders create space for unfinished ideas and allow others to improve on their own thinking. It’s about building a culture where ideas can come from anywhere, and where challenge is welcomed rather than resisted.
Creating these conditions means the best ideas can emerge. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, someone in the room will have a better answer if the environment allows it to surface. Leaders still decide, but they do so after listening.
They encourage people to speak up when they don’t fully understand something and ask the “silly” questions. People can be reluctant to ask those questions because they don’t want to appear uninformed but often everyone is thinking the same thing. By creating a safe space for these questions to be asked publicly, a leader helps strip things back to the first principles.
However, curiosity alone is not enough. The responsibility of leadership is translation. Taking insights gathered from elsewhere and making them meaningful within context. Inspiration becomes innovation only when it generates value, when it improves lives, processes or outcomes in a way that is relevant to the environment in which it operates.
Keep exploring
Today’s professionals want work that challenges them, clients they respect, and environments that allow them to stretch their creative and innovative muscles. If organisations cannot offer that, no level of remuneration will be enough to retain them. This makes the talent agenda a board level strategic priority, not just a peripheral HR concern.
It also demands greater selectivity. The model of bidding for everything and hoping something sticks is unsustainable. It burns out people and traps businesses in low margin, low value work. The future belongs to organisations that are selective about clients, clear about purpose and deeply human centred in how they operate.
The future will not belong to those who claim to have all the answers. It will belong to those who stay curious enough to keep exploring. This can easily be achieved by starting small, introducing curiosity prompts in team meetings, creating safe spaces for experimentation, and rewarding questions as much as answers. The world is ever changing, and the future is still being written.
By choosing curiosity over certainty, businesses empower their people to adapt, innovate and thrive.
Andrew leads the consultancy’s service transformation programme, providing guidance and oversight in the development and implementation of services worldwide across key areas including sustainability and digital transformation. A Chartered Quantity Surveyor, Andrew joined RLB in 2017 and a year later was appointed Head of Cost Management in London before assuming his role as Sector Lead and then a Service Transformation Director.
