Curiosity and Imagination Necessary Ingredients in Ethical Business

Questions About Curiosity and Imagination

What happens in business environments where curiosity and imagination flourish? How are curiosity and imagination related to ethics and business leadership?How are curiosity and imagination important in today’s business environment?

Why Curiosity and Imagination Matter

Some of the ways that curiosity and imagination matter in business environments include that:

Curiosity Helps Keeps People Open, Listening to Each Other and Engaged in Working Together
Curiosity and Imagination Allow People to See Issues From Multiple Perspectives
Curiosity and Imagination Help People Solve Problems
With Good Leadership, Curiosity and Imagination Become Innovation
Innovation Helps Companies Adapt
Adapting Helps Companies Stay Competitive

But are Curiosity and Imagination Really Necessary in Ethics?

On the surface, it doesn’t seem that curiosity and imagination are related to ethics. But think about what would happen in an environment where people were not able to use them. Could employees still be relied on to consistently behave ethically in an environment where they were not engaged in their work, and where they did not feel respected or fairly treated?

“I shall argue that the role of curiosity and imagination for both science and ethics is so important that nurturing them can be seen as an ethical obligation and suppressing them as ethically problematic.”

EH Loewy, University of California, Davis Medical Center in his article “Curiosity, Imagination, Compassion, Science and Ethics: Do Curiosity and Imagination Serve a Central Function?” in Health Care Analysis

Thinking More Broadly, Within Boundaries

We wouldn’t want people to be limited to only using familiar ideas, and on the other hand we wouldn’t want people to act on every idea they may come up with. The paradox is resolved by cultivating imagination in the context of ethical boundaries for behavior. A high-trust, high-expectation culture sets the stage for both imagination and ethical behavior.

“Why do we need an ethics of imagination? Because ethics without imagination is dogma, and imagination without ethics is dangerous. ”

Wrye Sententia, in her article The Ethics of Imagination: The Space Between Your Ears, Journal of Geoethical Nanotechnology

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand. ”

Albert Einstein

For Further Reading:

I’m Curious: Can we Teach Curiosity? by Chris Guthrie, Hamline University

Curiosity, Imagination and Failure: The New Big Three by Zane Safrit, American Express Open Forum

5 Unethical Phrases: Low Trust by Linda Fisher Thornton, LeadinginContext.com

Ethical Interpersonal Behavior Graphic: Red, Green and Yellow Zones by Linda Fisher Thornton, LeadinginContext.com

Cultivating Curiosity, CuriousMind.com