I’ve recently taken on a new opportunity that has put me back into a period of rapid learning.

There’s something both exciting and humbling about being new. You don’t know what you don’t know yet. You’re learning the people, the history, the systems, and all of the unwritten things that rarely make it into an orientation or handbook.

With each new adventure, I am left thinking about curiosity a little differently.

As a consultant, I’ve always thought of this period as discovery. When I enter an organization, I ask questions before I make recommendations. What am I seeing? How did we get here? What purpose does this process serve? What happened before I arrived that I need to understand?

Someone stepping into a new leadership role might instead find themselves on a listening tour. Different context, but the opportunity is similar.

Being new gives us permission to ask why differently than our longer-tenured peers.

Is this system currently working? What problem was it designed to solve? Is that problem still the problem we’re trying to solve today? And the harder to process at times, what might I be missing because I don’t yet understand the history or context?

Part of being curious is recognizing that what doesn’t make sense at first may make perfect sense once we understand the history and context behind it.

But the reverse can also be true.

Sometimes we discover that no one quite remembers why something is done a particular way. A process made sense five years ago. A workaround became a procedure. A response to one difficult situation quietly became the way everyone is expected to operate.

Eventually, “Here’s why we do this” becomes “This is how we do this.”

And that’s where I think curiosity has to turn inward.

Organizations are often staffed with people who genuinely care about their work and believe in their missions. And yet, an organization can be committed to changing systems and still reproduce some of the very norms it hopes to change.

We can value community voice and still make decisions without the community. We can say we want people to challenge the status quo and still reward the people who know how to navigate it. We can value trust and still build systems around control.

I don’t think these contradictions necessarily mean our values aren’t real. This is a both and moment in which values can exist alongside history, habits, pressures, funding requirements, power dynamics, and all the other realities of organizational life.

When we talk about curiosity, we tend to make it external-facing and about other people. Can I listen to a perspective different from my own? Can I stay open when I disagree? Can I resist making assumptions?

These types of questions remain important to me, but I’m equally as interested in what happens when we turn curiosity toward the organizations and systems we participate in.

Just think about what we normalize simply because it is familiar. What assumptions are underneath the way we lead, hire, supervise, fund, evaluate, or make decisions? And perhaps the harder question: Where might our everyday practices be working against the values we genuinely believe in?

When I hit these moments I find myself returning to double-loop learning.

Sometimes we need to ask, “How can we do this better?”

But sometimes the better question is, “Why are we doing it this way in the first place?”

A small shift with a major impact. It asks us to consider that the problem may not only be the effectiveness of our actions. Sometimes it is the need to examine the beliefs and assumptions underneath them.

Ultimately that requires a different kind of curiosity. One in which we create enough space to ask, What might we not be seeing?

I think that question matters especially in organizations working toward social change. If our mission is to imagine something different in the world, we also have to be willing to examine the systems we are creating inside our own walls.

And maybe that is one of the gifts of being new. It’s something I often encourage my coaching clients to take advantage of. There’s a window when you’re new where you notice things others may no longer notice, and you can ask questions without already assuming you know the answers.

Before the unfamiliar becomes familiar, we have an opportunity to pay attention to what we’re seeing. Moments where we can ask why, and get curious about what we might otherwise eventually learn to accept as simply “the way things are.”

The harder challenge may be holding onto that curiosity once we do.

Because once we know the acronyms,  understand the processes and have learned about the history, the idea that is “the way we do things” starts making perfect sense to us too.

I’m not sure perfect alignment between what we value and what we practice is ever completely possible. And to that end perhaps should not even be the goal.

Maybe the practice is continuing to notice the distance between what we say matters and what people actually experience, and staying curious enough to do something with what we find.