Be Curious, Not Judgmental

When Ted Lasso Is Right About More Than Darts

If you've seen the show, you know the scene. Ted Lasso is at his local pub, gets challenged to a game of darts by a guy who's been underestimating him since the start of the season, and proceeds to absolutely dismantle him. Before puts the final nail in the coffin, he quotes Walt Whitman: "Be curious, not judgmental."

The point of the quote in the scene is that everyone who ever underestimated Ted assumed they already knew what he was. They never bothered to ask. And it cost them.

It's a great TV moment. It's also, if you think about it for another thirty seconds, a pretty sharp piece of operational advice.

Many Leaders Aren’t Humble Enough to Be Curious

There's a version of "asking questions" that isn't really curiosity at all. It's seeking confirmation of what you assume to be true. You walk into a problem with a working theory, you ask questions that point toward that theory, and when the answers loosely support it, you call that a diagnosis.

The tell is in how it feels. Genuine curiosity is a little uncomfortable. You're open to finding out you were wrong. You're open to finding out the problem is somewhere you didn't expect, or that the person you thought was the issue is actually navigating a broken system with more grace than you realized. Genuine curiosity requires humility.

Evaluating feels efficient. You already know the answer, you're just collecting evidence.

The problem is that you also stop hearing anything that doesn't fit your expected narrative.

This Is Where the Gemba Walk Comes In

One of the most useful practices in operational improvement is something from Lean/Six Sigma called a Gemba Walk (gemba meaning “the actual place” in Japanese). The idea is simple: you go to where the actual work happens and you watch how it’s done. Not to audit, not to catch anyone doing something wrong, but to see what you can't see from your desk.

The only way a Gemba Walk actually works is if you go in curious. If you walk onto the floor, into the back office, into the field, already carrying a conclusion, you will find exactly what you went looking for and nothing else. However, that may not actually be the full true picture.

The whole value of the exercise is in what surprises you. And if you’re doing it right, something almost always surprises you.

The Diagnosis That Never Happened

Here's a pattern I've seen more than once: a leader is frustrated with output from a particular team. They've waited long enough for the team to fix it on their own and now they're confident they know what the problem is. So they skip the deep diagnostic, implement a fix aimed at that problem, and blame the team when, inevitably, things don't improve.

The answer, almost every time, is that the real bottleneck was somewhere upstream. The team they were blaming wasn't the source of the slowdown. They were just the most visible place where the slowdown showed up. Nobody ever asked them to walk through exactly what happens when a request comes in, step by step, start to finish. The leader wasn’t genuinely curious.

Fifteen minutes of genuine curiosity would have found it. Instead, the organization spent time and money solving the wrong problem.

…Not Judgmental

The second part of the Whitman quote is also essential to a proper Gemba Walk. You can’t just be internally curious, you also have to make it clear externally that you’re not being judgmental.

If the leader of the organization shows up at someone’s work station one day to “see how the work is done,” that person’s natural inclination (sadly) is that they’re being watched for doing something wrong and so they may not do the work the way they normally do. They put on a show.

Making it clear that you’re not there to catch them doing something wrong, that you’re genuinely curious about the way they work and in maybe finding some roadblocks in their work you can remove, should help put them at ease enough to be candid.

The Most Efficient Diagnostic Tool You Have

Genuine curiosity costs nothing except the willingness to be wrong about what you thought you already knew. No software required. No consultant needed. Just the discipline to walk in with open questions instead of a verdict, and to actually listen to what comes back.

Ted Lasso's opponent had already sized Ted up in his mind. He thought he had all the data he needed. He was confident…and completely missed what was actually in front of him, because he'd already decided.

Don't be the person who has already decided.

If something in here resonated, I'd love to hear what you're running into in your organization. Reach out at tim@11thstreetconsulting.com. No pitch, just a conversation.