What curiosity does to politics and drama
Hello again!
"Politics and Drama."
While this sounds like it could be the name of a new Netflix series, it is a phrase I say, often while rolling my eyes, whenever a work situation has me frustrated and I cannot quite explain why.
You have probably lived some version of this: A decision was made and everyone got moving. Now the department head is backpedaling, suggesting to slow down and look at other options, and nothing anyone has said accounts for the change.
Saying "politics and drama" gives me an excuse. Politics is vague, nobody owns it, and it sits well outside anything I control. Naming it that way is my passive way of deciding the situation cannot be fixed, or that fixing it is not worth my energy.
Using that excuse is my reactive response, and it spares me the digging that would tell me what is really going on. Something in the background that I do not fully understand is influencing the decision. Maybe someone tried this three years ago and it went badly, and nobody thought to mention it. Maybe the department head got an awkward question from their own boss last week. Maybe a peer is about to start a reorganization, and our work sits in the middle of it. Maybe someone asked for a favor, and the favor was to slow this down. I am unlikely to be told any of it directly.
After I get done rolling my eyes and mumbling "politics and drama", I put on my big girl pants and start asking the questions that matter. What can I find out? Who would already know? How much of it can I piece together on my own?
Figuring out what's going on below the surface
What we can see in a system is the easier part to understand and navigate: things like how the functions connect, where a process starts and ends, who reports to whom.
The rest of the system is made of influences, agendas, incentives, old histories, and relationships that no organizational chart depicts. This is the part that starts to explain what initially feels like politics and drama.
If I had asked the department head from earlier what had changed, or asked one of her direct reports what else is landing on the team right now, or asked her assistant how her week had been going, I might have learned that a bigger decision is sitting above ours and nobody has announced it yet.
That kind of insight is available to anyone curious enough to ask.
Building the sense
Some people seem to have a bloodhound's nose for smelling these kinds of insights. They can tell you who is driving a decision, what that person wants, and which piece of old history is still sitting in the room. While it looks like something they were born with, it is usually built through years spent simply paying attention.
This muscle of paying attention is often formed by regular displays of genuine curiosity:
Why does this team behave the way it does?
Who benefits from things staying exactly as they are?
Which behaviors get this person or this team rewarded?
Why does that decision keep coming back?
Asked with real interest, questions like these open a conversation, and they reveal what no status report ever will.
The answers rarely arrive in a meeting. They come up in the moments of human connection: over a coffee, on the walk to lunch, or in the few minutes before everyone has joined a video call. Over several of those conversations, small pieces emerge.
Enough of those pieces and the picture changes. What looked like politics resolves into a set of people with reasons, most of them understandable. The situation stops being drama and becomes a system you can see, describe, and navigate. That is how the bloodhound's nose is trained: many small questions, asked over time.
Try This: The Curiosity Coffee Challenge
3 Invitations, This week
Think of three people outside your usual circle: someone in a different function, someone on a different floor, someone whose work you have never really understood, or someone you have admired from afar.
Send each of them an invitation for coffee or lunch this week.
Then do the prep thinking. For each person, name three things that genuinely make you curious. For example: How did they end up in their role? Who is the most encouraging person they have worked with? What is the most random project they have ever been assigned?
Whatever they answer, follow it with why.
Reaching out to someone you barely know can feel uncomfortable, and that feeling eases with practice, which is how the muscle gets built in the first place. Go with your curiosity, and let the rest play out.
A quick look at where you stand
Reading the system around you is one of six key capabilities we think matter most as the future of work continues to evolve at an unprecedented pace. We built a short readiness check that gives you a snapshot of where your strengths sit and where there is room to grow.
Once you have completed it, you will also receive our free Micro-Skills email series.
What's Next?
Our course on Big Picture Thinking starts on September 23rd, and learning to identify what is going on below the surface is what it trains. Over three live sessions you map a real system from your own work, including the stakeholders, incentives and tensions inside it, learn to read the patterns moving through it, and find the points where a small move creates real change.
Would you like a feel for how we work first? Join our free taster session on Big Picture Thinking on September 8th at 18:00 CEST. Thirty minutes, online, open to anyone.
The politics and the drama do not disappear once you can see them. They stop being weather that happens to you, and start being something you can work with.
How do you handle the politics and drama in your own organization? Hit reply, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
All the best,
Amanda
on behalf of The Novaspex Academy Team