Last week, we brought to life the Ignition Behaviours which are part of the behaviour stack

• Nurture

• Curiosity

• Playfulness

This week, we’re focusing on the behaviours that help teams explore, adapt, and evolve the cultural signals that keep you learning instead of going into solution seductions to soon.

Today’s Focus: The Exploration Behaviours

• Selection of examples how the Exploration Behaviours are lived

• Tips on how to bring these into your working world

As a quick reminder this behaviour set is you in full explorer mode here, your doing everything you can to find new stimulus and stop you from going straight into this I know the answer and solution mode as a reminder

I like to see Novelty as a anti compass, if bau is a straight line your goal is to use this novelty compass to understand the direction but go wider to the left and right of the straight line.

The beginner mind set is there to remind you to continue being the newbie, ask why a 100 times, to find the other thing experts may look over.

Finally we have Realness which if we stick with the explorer anaology its your field notes, your field journal if you like this help you test, record and bring to like that you find

Feel free to go back over older posts to here for a deeper explanation, but today here is how a few other companies bring them to life

Real-World Examples: Novelty

Look outside your world to inject new thinking

IDEO’s “Tech Box” and Field Trips: Renowned design firm IDEO take the direction from a kids toy box to help adults think differently. These ‘tech boxes' have a collection of objects, artefacts and products from various industries. This is used to help them no get stuck in their typical bau thinking. Let’s say they are working on a new office design. The might pull out an audio guide from a recent Alcatraz tour. This piece of stimulus tied to office redesign instantly provokes you to look at it differently

IDEO, KNOT and ?WhatIf! are all big advocates of safaris, simply put this is a field trip of a say a toy shop, hospital theme parks etc something unrelated to the the project with the goal to spark some novel metaphor or approach that inspire the design toward the challenge

Starbucks took a novel approach to creating its orginal cafe concept, later down the line they look outside to the digital tech companies when coming up with their concept of the mobile app. This drive Starbuck to be as much a tech innovator as much as a coffee shop…now if they can just get me in to redesign the coffee shop experience that would be great… speak of coffee

Capital One’s Cafés: A financial services looked at coffee shops and asked what if a bank felt more like a coffee shop? Taking inspiration from coffee shop culture they created Capital One Cafés that are 50% part Peet’s Coffee and 50% part bank branch. This novel concept (bank meets cafe) attracts younger customers in a non-banky atmosphere and has been quite successful in branding and engagement.

Where to start

Cross-Industry mood Boards: When designing your next people product, service or experience first give the team a task of of researching how how completely different industries tackle a similar challenge and build a mood board of who and how

Field Trips & Safari Days: Literally go on tours to some of the above but also visit innovative startup if you’re a big company, bank etc go to a museum exhibit together, attend a conference unrelated to HR, or shadow a team in a different department go wherever your inspiration takes you

Encourage Stealing with Pride: Create a culture that proudly adapts ideas from elsewhere (do it with credit and name check of course) You might start a meeting by saying, “Who’s seen a cool idea we can steal this week?”

Where it fits: 

Novelty is useful everywhere, from how you select your people through to how we attract and particularly useful in candidate experience & selection (where doing something novel can spark curiosity and entice people in) If your in the UAE or Saudi for example and your goal is to create a a local program stop everything your doing and set up a pop up shop in a coffee shop watch what happens

Real-World Examples: Be the newbie

Keep learning, especially when you think you know the answer

Give your kid the challenge your facing and watch how they see it differently, your goal is to be that kids no matter that your job title is.

Reverse Mentoring at GE: Back in the day General Electric’s then-CEO Jack Welch instituted a reverse mentoring program to drive fresh eyes and fresh learning. Realising his board may have got stuck in their ways he made all top executives learn about the internet from junior employees. At the time this was a pretty new concept and ultimately turn his board into a bunch of apprentices to a a group of 20 year olds

It wasn’t only a fast upskill for the execs but also sent a legit signal through the business that learning trumps hierarchy… While at TalkTalk we design and rolled out a similar project with massive success

Personal Example Adobe’s Kickbox Program: Adobe gave employees a red box with a $1,000 prepaid card and some instructions, encouraging anyone to pursue any idea. Interestingly, in the instructions it emphasises adopting a beginner’s mindset: assume you know nothing about the problem and go learn from scratch users, market, etc.

Where to start

Fresh Eyes Onboarding: Leverage new team members’ fresh eyes. In their first weeks, explicitly ask newcomers to note things that don’t make sense or could be improved for the last few weeks ive been ask a peer who’s had new team member how they are finding their new role, their manager etc… not to get intel on how the manager is but ultimately they will share gaps in whats missing for them.

Rotate Roles or Projects: Push experts out of their comfort zone occasionally. For example, have your HR analytics person spend a week with the recruiting team, or your L&D specialist shadow the marketing team’s campaign launch.

Love/Bugs/Idea: one of my roles in dubai is driving change in the HR team from how we talk, think, operate, build and ship people product moving a traditional HR function into a people product one is a big lift but It doesnt have to be done alone. Recently I put up a loves bugs and ideas board up on the HR with minimum direction the board start to fill up with what they love (this gives me a steer on what to crank up) Bugs (this give me a steer on what to blockers to smash through) ideas (This gives me buckets of stimulus and idea I may never have come up with)

Where it fits

Apprentice Mindset is crucial in Growth & Development and Leadership phases of the employee journey from CEO down it underpins a culture of continuous learning. It’s also valuable anywhere you fear “expertise trap” might occur.

Real-World Examples: Realness

Use scrappy happy to bring to life concept idea early by making them tangible and something people can see, feel and play with

Amazon’s “Two-Way Door” philosophy: Amazon encourages teams to make reversible decisions quickly in practice to do that they run a lot of small experiments in order to present back real life insights. When Amazon considered a major redesign of the Prime onboarding flow, instead of debating for months, a team built a simple alternate flow and A/B tested it on a tiny percentage of users. It gathered real data with minimal risk a two-way door, because if it failed they could roll back easily. They simple ran what I call a simple 4S approach: Sketch it, Show it, Scale or Scrap it

IBM’s Early Design Mock-ups: When IBM overhauled its performance management system a few years ago, the HR design team created low-fidelity prototypes paper mock-ups of a new performance feedback app and put them in front of employees and managers for input. They didn’t wait to code a full app. That early feedback led them to remove some features and add others long before any serious resources were spent displaying the value of what a true human centered/design thinking approach can bring

Government Digital Services: Even bureaucracies are learning to “show, don’t slide.” The UK’s Government Digital Service (GDS) famously rebuilt many public services by rapidly prototyping digital forms and websites with real citizens, rather than writing long specs.

Where to start

Prototype Every Idea: Adopt a rule: no idea moves forward without some kind of prototype or tangible demo. It could be a sketch, a mock website, a role-played scenario, or a storyboard.

Test and Learn: Set up smalls experiments with clear hypotheses. E.g., “We believe offering a peer buddy in week one will improve new hire retention by X%. Let’s test it with the next 10 hires and see.

Apply in EVP Design: In EVP (Employee Value Proposition) design, Realness is gold. Instead of wordsmithing a lofty slogan and printing posters the classic slideware approach, prototype the EVP. For example, if part of your EVP is “We invest in growth,” randomly select a small group of employees and give them £1,000 learning budget and some time (a mini version of the promise) and see what happens.

Where it fits

Realness is needed wherever an idea needs to prove itself. It shines in talent acquisition & employer branding e.g., A/B testing job ad wording or career page layouts in real campaigns, in EVP design as mentioned, prototyping your promises, and in any new program roll-out. If you hear “we’ve been planning this for a year” that’s a red flag

Wrap up

Exploration behaviours help kill of stale thinking, mistakes and the good old group think. The move you to have a more flexible, open and evidence based approach. If your redesign a process, designing your EVP or building a new people product, service or experience the last thing you want to do is lock in early instead explore widely

Next week we will go over the Execution Behaviours (Courage, Commitment, Momentum, and Cool Clues)

Thanks for reading if you’ve got thoughts to share just hit reply I always enjoy hearing from you Speak soon, Danny

🙋‍♂️ About the Author

I’m Danny Seals. I help teams design employee and customer experiences people actually remember want and need. For the last 15+ years, I’ve blended design thinking, service design, innovation strategy, and behaviour change to help organisations rethink how they work, what they offer, and how they show up. I’ve led projects like launching a People Experience Lab in a bank, redesigning EVP for a global brand, building new HR strategies, and running capability sprints that stick. You get the experience of a big agency without the price tag, the fluff, or the ten layers of sign-off.