Curiosity is often treated as a personality trait, a thing that you either have or don’t. But in futures and foresight work (and no doubt in other creative practices), curiosity functions more like a muscle that can be strengthened, weakened, or neglected over time.
Many of the systems we operate in actively discourage curiosity. Efficiency rewards quick answers. Expertise privileges certainty. Education often replaces questioning with compliance. Over time, it becomes easier to repeat familiar narratives than to explore what might be changing beneath the surface.
This is one reason futures conversations can feel difficult. Curiosity has atrophied. That’s not because people don’t care, I think, but because they haven’t been invited to practise it.
Good futures facilitation helps rebuild that capacity. It does this by legitimising questions without immediate answers, by slowing conversations down, and allowing time notice what feels strange, unresolved, or emerging. Curiosity becomes less about novelty and more about attentiveness. This attentiveness can help us pay careful attention to what’s shifting in the world and in ourselves.
Seen this way, curiosity isn’t optional in futures work. It’s foundational. Without it, the work collapses into prediction or optimisation of the present without thinking where this might take us. With it, uncertainty becomes something we can explore rather than avoid.
Curiosity doesn’t guarantee better futures. But without it, we’re almost certain to repeat old ones.