My mom was making spaghetti for dinner. My oldest - who is a grown man now - was still a toddler then. He kept asking me to pick him up.
"So I can see what grandma's doing!"
Mom had a strict rule that kids don't play in the kitchen and that included bringing in a chair or sitting on the counter to see what's happening. My arms were getting tired shifting him back and forth from one arm to the other. But he watched with curiosity and delight as Mom stirred boiling pots and added seasonings, like some kitchen witch tending her cauldron to make her sauce just right.
Kids are curious. They want to know why the water bubbles, why the toaster pops, and what happens when you turn the knob on the stove.
They want to KNOW.
And most toddlers I've encountered aren't thinking about whether or not it's a convenient time to ask questions. Curiosity doesn't wait for an invitation!
You don't have to teach a baby to be curious. They'll spend countless minutes discovering their own feet, reaching for the mobile over their crib, or puzzling about why something makes noise when they shake it.
Curiosity isn't exclusively a human thing, either. It's part of how living creatures investigate their environments, find resources, recognize threats, and learn what happens when they interact with the world.
Curiosity helps us survive. And sometimes the very instinct that keeps us alive also teaches us to suppress our curiosity. Our brains get so good at protecting ourselves from the unfamiliar that we stop exploring what's possible.
I'm not saying all caution is bad. Far from it! Our experiences help shape which parts of our natural curiosity we're willing to exercise - for better or worse.
One of the questions Mom hated hearing from me was "why?" I was relentless, wanting to understand everything about everything. By the third time I asked, she'd let out a roar:
"BECAUSE I SAID SO!"
That was scary enough to shut me up for a while... but not forever. I'd usually be back at it in a day or two with some new thing I was curious about. Somehow we ended up with a set of encyclopedias and after that, when I asked why, mom would make me write a 5-page book report to answer whatever question I was trying to answer.
That slowed me down, but I never did stop asking, "why?"
I told you. Relentless.
But a child who repeatedly gets punished for asking questions may eventually stop asking them. A child who is humiliated for not knowing something may learn to pretend they understand. A child who grows up in an environment where exploring is dangerous may become an adult who approaches unfamiliar situations with caution, distrust, or fear.
A friend and colleague of mine likes to say, "Your internals create your externals." I think it's more of a loop: Our thoughts, beliefs, experiences, and emotions influence how we behave in the world. The world responds to those behaviors, which then influences what we think and believe about ourselves.
Sometimes that loop teaches us to stay inside boundaries we never consciously chose. Then, we become experts at staying inside those boundaries to survive.
But we were meant for more than just survival.
Curiosity is one of the most important survival skills we have. And like a muscle, it needs exercise. When we stop using it, atrophy makes it harder to try new things, but it also makes it harder to survive when some new "threat" appears.
Like, oh, I dunno, the whole AI conversation that's raging right now.
Curiosity is not a blank check. My kid may be curious about the stove, but I don't let him play with it.
And a responsible parent doesn't have to smack a child's hand to teach them about danger.
My friend, Megan, is incredibly good at this. When her son is exploring the world and has curious questions, she explains what's happening to her child and shows him how things work. She also sets boundaries around what her child is allowed to touch - and how to touch. Like petting animals, for example. She finds safe ways for her child to participate and honor his curiosity at the same time.
That's what healthy guardrails do. They make exploration safer.
I said before, curiosity is a muscle, so let's follow that metaphor.
You can build strong, healthy muscles through exercise. You can over-train, use performance-enhancing drugs, or push yourself beyond what your body can safely sustain.
You can use those same muscles to carry groceries for an elderly neighbor or to punch someone in the face. We don't blame the muscle for the punch because the muscle isn't the problem. What you choose to do with that muscle matters.
Curiosity gives us the drive to discover. Ambition often gives us the drive to turn those discoveries into action. Founders and leaders often possess both in abundance and that combination can produce extraordinary things!
But ambition without meaningful guardrails can also produce extraordinary harm.
I'm on the fence about artificial intelligence. I see that there's a LOT of good it can do. And I have serious reservations about how quickly it has developed and the conditions that made that acceleration possible.
Generative AI systems were trained on enormous collections of human-created material - much of it without consent or compensation.
In September 2026, the Authors Guild and other plaintiffs asked a federal court to reject OpenAI and Microsoft's fair-use defense. In October, publishing and copyright organizations joined that challenge.
People spent their lives developing ideas, writing, creating art, and producing the knowledge these systems learned from. And the companies developing the technology stand to capture enormous value from it.
Had AI developed more organically, with meaningful contributor consent and accountability built into the process, then I'd probably feel a LOT better about it. That said, we're still facing the possibility of a human creation that could also be an extinction-level event unto itself.
But I digress...
Instead, we're watching a race in which being first, being bigger, and being more powerful can produce tremendous competitive advantages. I'm not convinced the people in that race face constraints proportionate to the potential consequences for the rest of us:
We can't evaluate these decisions on good intentions alone. People can genuinely believe they're helping humanity while creating consequences they didn't adequately investigate.
That's why accountability matters BEFORE the damage is done. The curious toddler needs boundaries to keep them from getting burned. The ambitious founder needs boundaries to keep other people from getting burned.
In both cases, those boundaries should be designed to protect people without eliminating the opportunity to discover something worthwhile.
Today's marketing is trying to convince us that AI is a tool that can help us explore MORE. Information. Ideas. More answers. More possibilities. And sometimes it absolutely does.
Personalized AI systems can even remember what we're interested in, what we're working on, and what we already know, helping them produce increasingly more relevant responses. Sounds useful, right?
But what if a system becomes so good at giving us information that fits us that it becomes less likely to introduce us to anything new? What if we're not getting better answers to our questions, but instead we're gradually narrowing the kinds of questions we even think to ask?
There's research suggesting that the relationship between AI assistance and intellectual exploration is more complicated than it first appears.
In a 2024 study, researchers investigated what happened when people used generative AI to help write short stories. The AI-assisted stories were evaluated as more creative, better written, and more enjoyable, particularly among participants who initially scored lower on creativity.
But they also became more similar to one another.
They found "an increase in individual creativity at the risk of losing collective novelty."
Hmmm...
If everyone on your leadership team uses AI to help develop ideas, and those ideas become increasingly similar, how many genuinely different possibilities are you really considering?
A separate study in 2026 examined more than 200,000 human–ChatGPT interactions. The researchers found that conversational AI was opening up some new ways of asking questions - more than a standard web search. But they also found that AI responses were "less diverse than Google search results in the majority of topics" when seeking information instead of conversation. What's more, the diversity of AI responses was associated with changes in the diversity of questions users later asked!
Seems like there's a feedback loop between what the technology presents and what people explore next. That doesn't prove AI personalization causes people to become less curious, but it does suggest that the information we're presented with may influence what we subsequently investigate. So, the system can help us find answers faster, but it won't necessarily help us find the questions we didn't know we needed to ask.
In your organization, leadership has a strategy. They've made certain assumptions about the market, their customers, their employees, and what success should look like. Over time, those assumptions become embedded in the language everyone uses.
Now introduce AI.
The system can analyze documents, summarize meetings, identify trends, and generate recommendations based on the information it's given. That might save enormous amounts of time, but what if the people who recognize contradictions have learned that pointing them out isn't welcome? OR what if the data reflects a model of reality that has been incomplete for years?
AI may help you be exponentially more efficient, and the resulting analysis may look more rigorous than ever, but you may still be running on only half the information you need to get the results you're aiming for.
In a 2025 study of 319 knowledge workers, researchers found that greater confidence in people's own abilities was associated with more critical thinking, while greater confidence in AI was associated with less critical thinking. That doesn't prove AI is making people intellectually weaker. It does raise real concerns about how people's judgment is impacted when technology provides "competent" answers.
I've said it before: "The math may not lie, but it can answer the wrong question with astounding accuracy." But now we add another dimension: What if we're becoming less likely to encounter the questions that would show that your model is incomplete in the first place? What if those possibilities gradually become harder for us to imagine?
THAT could become a serious organizational problem!
I've said many times: you train people how to treat you. Organizations can teach people to suppress their curiosity. Rewards and penalties are subconscious "training" for our teams.
An employee raises an uncomfortable question. Leadership dismisses it. They try again. This time they're told they're being negative or resistant to change. Eventually, they learn to keep their concerns to themselves.
The organization might interpret that silence as alignment. But silence doesn't necessarily mean agreement. Sometimes it means people have learned that questioning the prevailing story isn't worth the personal cost.
I call that Quiet Compliance.
It's particularly dangerous when the leaders that wield the power have little or no meaningful guardrails on their own ambition. The organization becomes a place where those leaders can move at speed, but employees don't dare to ask if they're moving in the right direction.
And if you add AI systems that repeatedly reinforce the organization's established assumptions, well, that's a recipe for disaster.
I don't think the answer is to stop exploring, stop innovating (or to stop using AI altogether). I also don't think we should embrace every technology just because it's there.
Curiosity needs room to breathe - with opportunities to experiment and discover possibilities nobody anticipated...
AND the freedom to challenge those experiments.
A curious scientist can explore whether a technology is possible without deploying it at scale irresponsibly. A leader can investigate a potentially profitable strategy without committing everyone else's livelihoods to an untested assumption. And an organization can encourage employees to challenge the prevailing model without treating every question as a reason to abandon the strategy.
Healthy boundaries make responsible exploration possible.
They don't demand unquestioning obedience. And they don't give powerful people a free pass just because they're pursuing something exciting.
What questions have we stopped asking because we think we already know the answers?
Who has the power to act on those answers before we consider the consequences?
Unchecked ambition can threaten our collective survival, but so can environments that teach us to stop being curious.
My toddler wasn't concerned about productivity, quarterly results, or whether asking another question might make him look foolish. He just wanted to understand.
As kids grow, they learn that not every question has an easy answer. They also learn that just because you can do something doesn't automatically mean they should.
The world is getting more complicated. The decisions facing organizations and individuals won't get less consequential just because AI can help us make them faster. And the answers we've relied on in the past won't always fit the conditions we're facing tomorrow.
We need people who:
Curiosity is not just understanding. Sometimes its greatest value is revealing that we've been asking the wrong questions. And sometimes the question that matters most is one nobody in the room has thought to ask yet.