Scott Shigeoka
Building a Culture of Curiosity
A practical guide for building stronger teams, healthier cultures, and more adaptive leadership.
Scott Shigeoka
A practical guide for building stronger teams, healthier cultures, and more adaptive leadership.
Part I · The Case for Curiosity
Loneliness, polarization, burnout, distrust, and the rush of new technology aren't just headlines — they're deeply human questions showing up in how we relate, lead, and belong at work.
Loneliness & Connection
1 in 5 employees worldwide feel lonely
Work is one of our primary places to experience connection — yet many workers feel unseen, unsupported, and disconnected.
Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2024
Polarization
45% have faced political disagreement at work
When people fear what speaking might cost them, communication narrows, trust erodes, and working across difference breaks down.
Society for Human Resource Management
Burnout & Wellbeing
76% of employees experience burnout
Navigating chronic stress and information overload, workers grow more reactive and disconnected from meaning and creativity.
Gallup, State of the Global Workplace
Leadership Distrust
Only 19% strongly trust their leadership
Without trust, it becomes harder to communicate honestly, navigate uncertainty, or build the shared purpose healthy cultures depend on.
Gallup
Emerging Technology
57% hide their AI use from employers
Rapid change brings possibility and uncertainty. Many feel behind, with little shared literacy or thoughtful guidance.
KPMG Survey, via Business Insider
Belonging
Only 2 in 10 have a best friend at work
Workers are searching for places where they feel seen, valued, and remembered. Relationships at work can feel transactional and unstable.
Gallup
The Opportunity
Not a magic pill or a cure-all, but a powerful starting point. Because these challenges are fundamentally about people, organizations that cultivate curiosity may be better equipped to navigate them. Curiosity can be one of our strongest interventions.
Part II · How to Practice
It's one thing to understand why curiosity matters. It's another to practice it in the messy realities of meetings, conflict, wellbeing, and technology. Explore five places to begin — with practices, reflection questions, and real examples Scott admires.
How Curious Cultures Are Built
At a moment defined by change, curiosity is more than a soft skill — it's necessary to meet the uncertainty, complexity, and connection challenges shaping the modern workplace. Instead of outsourcing to Google or AI tools, what might it look like to reclaim curiosity as a human skill, and a core part of workplace infrastructure? Where we learn something deeper about ourselves and each other through the work we do. Where leaders are trusted. Where collaboration across differences leads to success, not explosions.
These case studies aren't blueprints to copy perfectly — they're invitations to learn from people already experimenting with what a more curious workplace can look like.
Curiosity fuels creativity, innovation, and adaptive thinking. It helps teams challenge assumptions, stay open to new perspectives, and generate stronger ideas — sometimes ones that would never be discovered otherwise.
Case Study — Pixar
Pixar activates curiosity by expanding the definition of who's part of the creative process. The studio intentionally invites feedback not only from directors and animators, but from people across the organization — custodial staff, accounting, the front-desk person, and other "unlikely collaborators." It's rooted in a belief that great storytelling requires understanding human emotion, not just technical expertise, and that the best ideas can come from anyone. By drawing on a wider range of lived experiences, the studio often surfaces more emotionally resonant ideas and unexpected creative breakthroughs.
One example is the making of Inside Out. As the team explored how to tell a story about human emotions, they worked closely with psychologists and emotion researchers — including Dacher Keltner of the Greater Good Science Center and self-compassion researcher Kristin Neff. These collaborations helped shape how emotions, memory, and relationships were represented on screen, contributing to the film's emotional depth and cultural resonance.
Curiosity is a vital practice for navigating difference and disagreement. It reduces assumptions, expands how we see others, and shifts conversations from debate toward understanding.
Case Study — A Year of Curiosity, Howard County Library
Scott leads partners through what he calls a "Year of Curiosity" — an initiative focused on building curiosity as a competency inside organizations and communities. In 2025, he partnered with Dr. Kelly Clark of the Howard County Library System in Maryland to help neighbors practice curiosity through a series of shared experiences.
The community hosted a potluck dinner for hundreds of neighbors, tying conversation prompts to each course of the meal to build relationships through curiosity. Residents then hosted smaller dinners in their own living rooms, drawing even more neighbors into curious conversation. Scott shared curiosity practices at the local library, gave out free copies of Seek, and worked with Clark's team to weave curiosity into the library's ongoing programming.
Curiosity can reduce anxiety, shift people from fear into exploration, and build resilience. It offers a space for reflection and renewal in the middle of chronic stress.
Case Study — Missy Rentz
Wellbeing expert and practitioner Missy Rentz practices curiosity as a manager and leader of teams, encouraging leaders and employees to get curious about what energizes them inside their work. One practice she has championed is the "passion project" — a project each team member cares deeply about that stretches their creativity, challenges their thinking, and addresses a real need within the organization, even beyond the boundaries of their formal role.
The goal isn't extra productivity; it's creating space for people to reconnect to meaning, creativity, and intrinsic motivation. When one employee recognized that their organization struggled to tell its story, they proposed launching a podcast — which evolved into an ongoing series that strengthened the org's credibility and storytelling. Missy embodies this herself through The Parks Podcast, exploring public lands and public health. Practices like passion projects and no-meeting Fridays point to a broader insight: wellbeing isn't only about reducing stress, but cultivating the conditions that help people feel alive, purposeful, and creatively engaged.
Curiosity is an antidote to assumptions and premature judgment. Belonging emerges through repeated relational care — asking follow-up questions, remembering details, noticing contributions, and helping people feel they matter.
Case Study — Walmart
As one of the largest employers in the world, Walmart might seem an unlikely place to build belonging at scale. Recently the company explored how belonging is shaped through small interpersonal moments that signal recognition and care. Scott visited stores in Tennessee and North Carolina and heard associates' stories firsthand: one in Tennessee described how meaningful it felt when a coworker remembered to ask about their daughter's recital days later; another in North Carolina reflected on how being encouraged to test his own ideas made him feel his contributions mattered.
Capturing and sharing these short vignettes helped establish belonging as a visible social norm — grounding it not in abstract culture language, but in everyday behaviors: remembering details, asking follow-up questions, noticing contributions, and expressing genuine interest in others. Belonging like this has a direct business impact on retention, engagement, trust, and connection.
AI is certainly not the first, nor the last, technological transition that will shape how we work — there will be many we haven't yet imagined. Curiosity moves us beyond blind adoption or total resistance, helping us navigate the nuance of change by asking deeper questions: What problem is this solving? What human capacities might it strengthen — or weaken? Who benefits? Who is harmed or excluded? What downstream effects might emerge over time?
Case Study — ASCD + ISTE
In conversations with educators and learning leaders through partnerships with ASCD and ISTE, Scott explored how curiosity can help people engage emerging technologies like AI with greater intentionality and discernment. Rather than framing AI as something to either fully embrace or fully reject, these conversations focused on keeping human curiosity central in technology-shaped environments.
One example involved rethinking how assignments are designed in the age of AI. Instead of simply asking students to generate answers with AI tools, Scott suggested pairing technology with deeply human experiences — interviewing someone outside their worldview, spending time in nature, engaging local community stories, or exploring a cultural tradition firsthand. AI could support synthesis or exploration, but not replace lived experience, observation, discernment, or relationship-building.
Part III · Curious Leadership
Curious leaders aren't all curious in the same way. These archetypes aren't fixed identities — they're flexible, learnable, situational patterns. Most people recognize one or two in themselves.
Outward · Environment
"What's happening on the ground?"
Immersive, visible, field-based leadership — listening tours and experiential learning.
Across · Perspectives
"Is this actually true? What's missing here?"
Challenges assumptions, elevates debate, and centers multiple viewpoints.
Inward · Experience
"What are we learning from this?"
Observes patterns, leads debriefs, synthesizes insight, and deepens culture.
Forward · Future
"What could this become?"
Visionary framing, storytelling, scenario-building, and long-term thinking.
Take the 5-minute quiz to find your curiosity archetype — and see how it shows up in how you lead.
Part IV · Sustaining Curiosity
Building a curious workplace culture is an ongoing practice. Like trust, belonging, or leadership itself, curiosity grows through repetition, reinforcement, reflection, and community.
As you reflect on your own workplace, consider: Where is curiosity currently missing? What assumptions shape how your team leads, collaborates, or makes decisions? What might shift if curiosity became less of an individual trait and more of a shared cultural norm?
Scott's Debut Book
A human invitation to live with deeper curiosity — to strengthen relationships, bridge divides, and move through the world with more openness. Translated into several languages, and a winner of the Amazon Best Books Award.
Work with Scott Shigeoka
The Flagship Engagement
A year-long engagement with Scott and his team to build a curious culture — shaping how people lead, collaborate, communicate, and build belonging over time.
Start the conversation →Or bring Scott to your stage
01
Inspiring, practical talks that translate the science of curiosity into tools for connection and leadership — often paired with Q&As, activities, or fireside conversations.
02
Scott shapes the relational arc, energy, and shared experience of conferences, convenings, and leadership events through connective facilitation.
03
Interactive sessions that deepen curiosity practices within teams — from executive leadership sessions and team retreats to culture workshops and facilitated dialogues.
Flowers 💐
With gratitude to the leaders, researchers, and communities already experimenting with what a more curious workplace can look like.
Special thanks to Kate Barranco of Conscious Futures for her partnership and insight.
Keep exploring curiosity as a practice — watch the talk, dive into the work, and join a community building connection through wonder.