How to keep the attention of your audience through sheer curiosity, when there’s no direct reward for them to listen to you or read your message.

Last month, we saw how you can motivate audiences to read something when:

1. There's a visible payoff for them reading it. Some financial or other work benefit.

2. They can help you now, and they know that you can help them in the future.

3. They can learn something useful.

   
   

But sometimes we have no obvious payoff for the audience, for example:

1. For compliance, they have to read a policy, and they don’t see a direct benefit (they may even feel that it slows their work down!)

2. The information is just general knowledge-sharing, such as a newsletter that a department sends to the whole organization.

You might argue “Why write anything, in that case?” Sometimes, CEOs order their organizations to cut down on “unnecessary communication”. I don’t know how much that usually works, and I’m not asking that question here. I’m writing for fellow managers, not idealistic bosses.

So at times, we have to convey a message that has no intrinsic payoff, not even a sweetener, and we have to try to make it interesting in itself. To do that, we have to spark the audience’s curiosity.

Sparking curiosity is no bad thing — in fact, it’s is a really good trait to encourage at work. Amazon has “learn and be curious” as a key leadership principle. And academic research stresses the value of curiosity for leaders. (There are surprisingly good references in this HBR article: The Business Value of Curiosity.)

But, can we create curiosity? That is, while we are delivering some planned communication (in writing or speech), can we do things to make it more interesting in itself?

Academic research suggests that we can. Social scientists have settled on some key factors that make a message more interesting.

I also think we can. But not for the same reason as the social scientists. At least, I don’t think they’re wrong, but they’re missing something. Through the presentations, workshops, trainings, coachings, and writings I’ve done, there’s a common thread with the ones that held the audience’s attention. And it’s not something that the academics seem to have spent much time on.

Let’s look at their tips and mine, and see if any of them are useful. Rather than just diving down some conceptual rabbit-hole of curiosity research, let’s look at an example that’s inspired by real events.

Case: The Show-and-Tell of Death

Let’s say that you’re a group from Finance, attending a company leadership gathering. As a warmer activity on the first day, each group has to present for 15 minutes about an interesting topic they’re working on.

Sounds like fun? An opportunity for other teams to really see the value in what you do, and maybe use your work in new ways?

Maybe you have never been to one of these things before. They can be teeth-grittingly boring, sometimes embarrassing. Oh sure, Sales usually do a good spot, as they’re so used to selling stories. And you know that the Marketing slides are going to be nice to look at, at least. But for other functions it is harder to grab attention, let alone communicate something useful.

On the morning of this gathering, you’re feeling that it’s especially hard for Finance, as you are not the most popular department in the company. Just yesterday, someone wrote you an email starting “Dear Beancounters…”. And at the moment, the main thing you’re working on is to introduce an accounting technique called “software capitalization”. You could talk about that, but how even to start?

Well … pretty much everyone cares about the stock price, right? It’s a primary measure of success, and anyway, many of your colleagues hold stock. So you can start by asking your gathered colleagues how they would feel — how any owner would feel — when the company spends money on itself.

How they feel depends on what the company buys, right? If it’s spending directly on sales activity, that makes sense. Or, if it’s buying a machine that will produce more or better products, that seems a good investment.

How about spending on other areas, such as development costs for software? That seems trickier. What are you getting after all? The developed code only pays off later down the line, when features drive sales. (Also, some investors might think about spending more on software as Google-style perks for developers: free buffets and expensive sports facilities.)

You point out to the audience that the stock will suffer if investors believe the company is spending too much, or spending on the wrong things.

Yet, if the company does not invest in its products, it will not generate new revenue in the future. How can it invest, without looking like some indulgent Silicon Valley pamperer? How can it build confidence, but also build for the future?

There is a neat way around this dilemma. Some development costs can legitimately count as buying an asset, which is a different kind of “cost”. It counts as if you have bought a physical thing, one that will help you make more money. And in this way it is not just money flowing out of the door of the company. At least, the cost is only incurred over several years of depreciation, the same as if you’d bought a piece of hardware.

When the company invests more in developing software, it can “capitalize” the costs in this way. And in this way it avoids the impression of spending wildly without a solid plan to make the money back. The plan is baked into the accounting method, smoothing the costs. Shareholders like this predictability.

By taking the audience through this reasoning, you’ve made the case for software capitalization, in a somewhat relatable way.

And you can go on to discuss a few gratifying or amusing accounts of how you’ve worked with various teams to capitalize what they’re building, and the features that they can and can’t count for this purpose.

You could outline the capitalization rules, and even challenge the audience with a quiz on various software features — which are capitalizable and which not? The list could include:

a) A feature that makes the software look nicer

b) A new capability — something extra that the software does for existing users

c) Another new capability, but something that helps you sell the software to a new market

d) Security fixes

e) Things that make the software less expensive for you to provide

[If you’re interested in which of these are likely to be capitalizable, read to the end of the post.]

So you could make this “show and tell” less boring, and somewhat motivating. In doing so, perhaps other teams will appreciate your work more. And at least they should complain less if you need their input towards the software capitalization exercise.

From this case, what factors might help to drive the audience’s curiosity? Any ideas? Why not write down what you think before reading further?

…

Here are the key aspects of this case that tie in to researchers’ recommendations on driving curiosity. Click the caret to expand each one.

So those are the three main factors that academics see determining how curious a message is (or at least how curious each individual in the audience is in the message).

And the factors do make sense. They tie in with what I’ve experienced. You need enough tension, drama, and surprise to grab the audience. But not so much tension or conflict that they feel overwhelmed, tired, or even manipulated.

Also, some sense of purpose in the information does help, as long as it’s not too exaggerated.

But what is missing from the academic analysis of curiosity? I get the sense of the academics studying us like dead butterflies, admiring our iridescent wings but missing the grace of the butterfly alive. They’ve studied the mechanism of curiosity, but missed its core, its spark.

Relatability rules

The thing that’s missing is this: you need to relate to something to be curious about it. Not just to know some facts about the thing already, on which to scaffold more facts. But to relate in some more human way. To believe in the key players of the case, that is to see them as humans.

With the capitalization case, the audience starts caring because they identify with the key players — both the shareholders and the needs of the company. It is only because the audience cares that the conflict and resolution work. Otherwise the talk would still be a set of boring facts, like the engineers describing the inner workings of some machine, when no-one knows what the machine does.

Think of other examples. Some mechanical parts fail and a government research program faces big trouble. That’s what happened with the Apollo 13 mission, but of course the movie Apollo 13 makes us care about it. Although we are not space scientists, it’s compelling: the image of being stuck in space in a little tin can with dwindling oxygen, and relying on the ingenuity of many people to get you back.

Or another example: the way that my daughter’s high school geography teacher got the class to care about human landmarks in the built environment. This topic is a national requirement at her age, which sounds dead boring in the official curriculum:

So what “examplar” did the teacher start with? In the UK, you can still see a few red phone boxes. Most of them don’t work any more. But the teacher made them real for the class by describing how it was to use a phone box: the task of fumbling for coins in your pocket, trying to get another 10p in the machine before the call to your friend cuts off.

The class took a moment to realize that at that time, you couldn’t just iMessage instead. But then the vivid description sank in, and the class started to realize that these big changes in human activity are embedded in the landscape all around us.

The learning point was made interesting. As my daughter described, the class weren’t interested at first, but they couldn’t help listening.

So we could call this missing ingredient “storytelling”. Although I think the burden of telling a story can make communicators sound fake. Maybe it’s better to call it “relatability”. When the audience can relate personally to the facts of a case, they can be gripped by its novelty or conflict. And then they can tolerate more uncertainty. To borrow another psychological term, they temporarily increase their openness to experience.

Sometimes the relatability may came through a sense of purpose, as in the Princeton study. But not everything needs to be about saving the world. More important that we relate to the information as if it were personally affecting us.

So those are the ingredients of curiosity, from academics’ point of view and mine. I’ve taken some shortcuts in summarizing them, but hopefully you start to get the idea.

Next time you’re exposed to new information, think about which of the above characteristics it has. Is it new and challenging? How confident are you that you’ll be able to understand it? Does it have a bigger purpose?

Most of all, is it relatable?

Quiz answers

Which features are likely to be capitalizable per UK accounting rules:

References

¹

Four collative variables in curiosity. The primary source is Berlyne, D. E. (1960). “Conflict, arousal, and curiosity”, but I read about his work in Paul J Silvia’s very approachable book Exploring the Psychology of Interest (2006).

²

For the general topic of perceptions of curiosity, you should read the section “Appraisals and Interest” from Chapter 2 of Paul J Silvia’s “Exploring the Psychology of Interest”, mentioned above. By the way, you can read this book online at The Internet Archive. You have to keep reading otherwise the book “loan” times out — perhaps another kind of motivating factor.

For the actual polygon studies, Silvia references his own article “What is Interesting” (2005) in Emotion, 5(1), 89–102.

³

For the studies on purpose driving curiosity, see Rachit Dubey, Thomas L. Griffiths, Tania Lombrozo, “If it's important, then I’m curious: Increasing perceived usefulness stimulates curiosity”, in Cognition, Volume 226, 2022