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they are naturally curious—or bold enough to ask about someone’s shoes. But here’s the secret: that doesn’t matter. You can use curiosity even if you don’t think of yourself as instinctively curious.
    As soon as I realized the power of curiosity to make my work life better, I consciously worked on making curiosity part of my routine. I turned it into a discipline. And then I made it a habit.
    But here’s an important distinction between me and even the hyper-analytical folks at Procter & Gamble. I actually use the word “curiosity” to talk about what I do, to describe it, and understand it. The rest of the world, though, almost never talks about this kind of inquiry using the word “curiosity.”
    Even when we’re being intently curious, in an organized, purposeful fashion, we don’t call it “curiosity.” The coach and his assistants who spend five days watching film to prepare for a game aren’t considered “curious” about their opponent, even as they immerse themselves in the thinking, personality, and strategy of that team. Sports teams simply call it “watching film.” Political campaigns call their form of curiosity “opposition research.” Companies that spend enormous sums of money and expend enormous effort to understand their customers’ behavior and satisfy their needs aren’t “curious” about their customers. They use phrases like “consumer research” or say they’ve developed an “innovation process.” (If they’ve hired expensive consultants to help them be curious, they say they’ve developed a “strategic innovation process roadmap.”)
    In 2011, Harvard Business Review published a nine-page case study of Procter & Gamble’s innovation and creativity efforts. The story is coauthored by P&G’s chief technology officer, and it is literally as long as this chapter, to this point—5,000 words. The authors say they want to describe P&G’s effort to “systematize the serendipity that so often sparks new-business creation.” In Hollywood, we call that “lunch.” But “systematizing serendipity”—finding ways to uncover great ideas—is exactly what any smart organization tries to do. Sam Walton was “systematizing serendipity” in the Saturday morning meetings. I have “systematized serendipity” with my curiosity conversations.
    In the Harvard Business Review story on P&G, the word “innovation” appears sixty-five times. The word curiosity: not once. 11
    That’s crazy. We simply don’t credit curiosity. We don’t even credit curiosity when we’re using it, describing it, and extolling it.
    The way we talk about this is revealing and important. You can’t understand, appreciate, and cultivate something if you don’t even acknowledge that it exists. How can we teach kids to be curious if we don’t use the word curiosity? How can we encourage curiosity at work if we don’t tell people to be curious?
    It’s not a trivial, semantic argument.
    We live in a society that is increasingly obsessed with “innovation” and “creativity.”
    Twenty years ago, in 1995, “innovation” was mentioned about eighty times a day in the U.S. media; “creativity” was mentioned ninety times a day.
    Just five years later, the mentions of “innovation” had soared to 260 a day; “creativity” was showing up 170 times a day.
    By 2010, “innovation” was showing up 660 times a day, creativity close behind at 550 mentions a day.
    Curiosity gets only a quarter of those mentions in the daily media—in 2010, about 160 times a day. That is, curiosity gets as many mentions today as “creativity” and “innovation” did a decade ago. 12
    The big U.S. universities maintain online databases of their faculty “experts,” so