Organised Curiosity: A Different Way To Move Through Your Day
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.
Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.
Creativity as a way of moving, not a special talent
We’re used to speaking about creativity as if it lives in certain people and certain professions. The designer is creative. The artist is creative. The strategist on the innovation project is creative. But look more closely and you see something else: creativity is not a job description, it’s a way of moving through the world.
It shows up when you:
Turn an awkward conversation into a genuine one by asking a different question.
Spot a pattern in your team’s behaviour that no-one has named yet.
Imagine an alternative to “the way we’ve always done it” and test it gently.
You do not need a studio or a blank canvas. You need attention, questions, and the willingness to follow them a little further than is strictly necessary.
That is where this term that I adore, organised curiosity, comes in.
What is organised curiosity?
Curiosity on its own is a spark.
Organised curiosity is what happens when you stop dismissing those sparks and start giving them a place to live.
It’s not about control or forcing outcomes. It’s about:
Catching the things that interest you.
Turning them into questions.
Giving those questions small, concrete next steps.
Instead of waiting for inspiration to arrive fully formed, you build a quiet, ongoing conversation with your own attention.
Departure points: the smallest possible beginning
You do not need a grand vision to begin. You only need a departure point.
A departure point is any moment where your interest is slightly higher than usual. A sentence in an article. A throwaway comment in a meeting. A memory that keeps resurfacing. A problem in your system that feels “off”.
Most people override those signals. Organised curiosity says: follow them, but gently.
A simple way to work with departure points:
Notice the tug.
When something lands, a line, an image, a situation, take three seconds to acknowledge it: “Something in me woke up here.”
Write one question.
Capture it in a notebook or notes app as a question, not a statement.
“What is it about this story that won’t let me go?”
“What is the pattern underneath this problem?”
“Who else might see this differently?”
Take a tiny next step.
Not a project plan. A tiny experiment.
Share the question with someone and see what they say.
Sketch what you’re thinking rather than keeping it in your head.
Read one extra thing on the topic.
Try a different approach once, in a low-stakes situation.
The point is not speed or outcomes. The point is momentum.
Walking, wandering and the intelligence of movement
I was inspired by www.mentorwalks.org led by the charismatic Mim Bartlett. Some of the most interesting thinking happens when you are not trying to think.
There’s a long lineage of writers, philosophers and scientists who used walking as a core part of their practice. Not as exercise or productivity hack, but as a form of moving attention. The rhythm of steps, the shifting landscape, the simple act of putting one foot in front of the other – all of it invites connections you don’t reach by force.
At a recent writer’s retreat hosted by the impressive Kelly Gardiner, we spoke about this rhythms and rituals. Charles Dickens wrote from about 9am to 2pm then went for a long walk, fast walks. Viginia Woolf said that mornings are for writing, afternoons for walking. Henry David Thoreau in his essay Walking, he insist he couldn’t preserve his “health and spirits” unless he spent at least four hour a day “sauntering” in nature, treating walking as a spiritual and creative discipline. Ralph Waldo Emerson regularly walk in the woods of New England often with Thoreau.
You can make this very light:
Take a ten-minute walk with a question in your pocket. Not to solve it, just to be with it.
Choose a different route once a week purely to notice what you usually don’t see.
Let your mind wander and see which ideas keep returning.
Movement gives your curiosity somewhere to travel. It stops it being an abstract, mental exercise and turns it into something lived.
Give yourself permission to make ordinary things
One of the biggest obstacles to creativity is the belief that anything you make has to be impressive.
If every idea has to justify itself in advance, in terms of quality, success, or “strategic alignment”, you will quietly shut most of them down before they begin.
An alternative: give yourself permission to make ordinary, small, even slightly clumsy things.
A rough sketch of a service that might exist one day.
A paragraph trying to describe a feeling you can’t quite name.
A simple prototype with real people, before it has a logo or a deck.
You do not have to share all of it. Much of it exists to teach you something about the problem, or about yourself. The world is an erratic judge of “quality” anyway. The more useful measure is: did you learn something you couldn’t have learned by thinking about it?
Organised curiosity thrives when the stakes are low enough to experiment.
The quiet systems behind a creative life
There is, underneath all this, a very practical layer.
People who seem endlessly creative are rarely just “spontaneous”. They have built small systems that protect and direct their curiosity.
You can start simply:
A single capture place.
One notebook or digital space where you collect your questions, sparks, fragments. Not ten. One.
A weekly review.
Once a week, give yourself 20 minutes to flick through what you’ve captured. Circle what still feels alive. Let go of what doesn’t.
A rhythm of experiments.
Commit to one small experiment a week. Not a reinvention of your life – something you can do in under an hour that moves one question forward.
These structures aren’t about productivity. They’re about creating a container where your curiosity is welcomed and not lost.
You’re allowed to come and go
There will be weeks when you are deep in delivery, caring for others, or simply tired. Your curiosity will feel quieter. That doesn’t mean you’ve “failed” at being creative.
Think of your creative life as an ecosystem with seasons.
There are seasons of planting, of growth, of harvesting, and of letting the soil rest. The important thing is not to maintain constant output. It is to keep some thin thread of connection to your own questions, even when life is full.
Organised curiosity means you can step away and step back in without drama. Your notebook is still there. Your departure points are waiting. You are allowed to begin again, as many times as you need.
A small prompt to try this week
If you feel even a slight pull to experiment with this, here is one simple practice for the next seven days:
The One Question Card
Take a small card, sticky note, or the first page of a notebook.
Write down one live question that feels real for you right now. It might be about your work, your leadership, your relationships, or your next chapter. For example:
“What kind of work do I want to be doing more of two years from now?”
“What would it look like to lead with more ease and less pressure?”
“How could our team make experimentation safer?”
Carry this question with you for a week, in your wallet, next to your laptop, on your bedside table.
Whenever you notice an idea, example, or conversation that touches this question, jot a word or two on the same card. No essays. Just fragments.
At the end of the week, read what you’ve captured and ask:
“What is one small experiment I could run next, based on what I’ve seen?”
That’s it. No big declarations. No grand reinventions.
Just one question, carried consciously, and a willingness to notice what arrives.
That is how organised curiosity begins: not with a dramatic move, but with a series of quiet, deliberate choices about how you use the small gaps in your day and who you are becoming inside them.