Asking Better Questions: Curiosity as a Leadership Advantage

What if the most valuable thing a leader brings isn’t an answer, but a better question?

In this conversation with the "Creativity Explorer" Frederick Haren, we delve into how curiosity, psychological safety, and small experiments shift leadership away from management-by-metrics and toward a living culture of everyday innovation.

We examine why speed, certainty, and control stifle creativity and how it revives when people may question, test, and iterate. Frederick shares the “golden paperclip” story of a missed billion-dollar idea, then introduces creative respiration: filtering inspiration, shaping experiments, and turning the strongest ideas into practice.

We also explore curiosity through language and culture. From cura as care, to the Bulgarian love of asking, Iceland’s idea of “before knowledge,” and the Swedish hunger for the new. Together, these reveal how good questions signal care, expand information, and sharpen vision. We discuss “bispective” thinking; seeing both sides of a system, and how it builds empathy and better decisions in sales, hiring, procurement, and even meetings.

You’ll leave with practical ideas you can use immediately. Swap scripts for genuine stories to role-model improvisation. Capture institutional wisdom through exit interviews. Break “industry incest” by borrowing patterns from other sectors. Can’t travel? Use AI to role-play different perspectives, take alternative routes through familiar places, and deliberately collect odd but useful inputs.

We also talk about opportunity and the doldrums. Catching the right wind means hoisting the sails. And why shifting your identity from expert to explorer makes you more present, more humble, and more effective.

If your team feels stuck in “how things have always been done,” this is your field guide to seeing differently and acting bravely. 

Subscribe, share it with a leader who needs a nudge, and leave a review with the one question you’ll ask your team this week.

Tune in for an inspiring conversation that will leave you equipped with the tools to lead with confidence, overcome obstacles and unlock The Power Within

email us at: info@motivuscoaching.com

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Transcript

Setting The Creativity Lens For Leadership

Keith 0:00

Welcome to the Power Within, the podcast that uncovers the real stories and strategies behind leadership and personal growth. I'm Keith Power, and in each episode I sit down with inspiring individuals who face challenges, built resilience, and discovered what it takes to lead with impact. Through their journeys, we'll explore the mindsets and tools that drive meaningful success. If you're ready to grow, lead and unlock your true potential, you're in the right place. My guest today is Frederick Haran. He has spent more than two decades exploring creativity across cultures, industries, and lived experience. Not to define it with a framework, but to understand it as deeply human capability. When we talk about leadership, we often focus on strategy, execution, performance, and results. But underneath all of that, it's something far more fundamental: the ability to see differently. Creativity isn't about being artistic or having clever ideas. It's about curiosity. It's about perspective. It's about the courage to step beyond what's familiar and question what we think we already know. In a world that rewards speed, certainty, and control, creativity can quietly disappear. Not because leaders don't value it, but because they stop creating the conditions for it to breathe. This conversation is for leaders who sense that the answers they need won't come from doing more of the same, but from seeing more, listening more, and thinking differently. Frederick Haran, welcome to The Power Within.

Fredrik 2:00

Hi, thank you so much. Really looking forward to this conversation.

Misunderstandings And The Power Of Everyday Innovation

Keith 2:04

So many leaders will see creativity as something for creative people or innovation teams. Based on your global work, though, Frederick, what do leaders most misunderstand about creativity?

Fredrik 2:18

To be honest, I think they misunderstand a few things. But one of the things they misunderstand is the power of it. It's extremely it's an extremely powerful force that can lead to very substantial successes and improvements if we use this power. And it's not, to me, the way I look at it, it's not about unleashing a lot of creativity in a small innovation team. It's about getting a culture where everyone is thinking about how we could do this a little bit differently. And if everyone does that, the whole the whole company will innovate a lot and improve a lot. There are so many processes that could be improved. It's it it basically it's literally unlimited.

Keith 3:04

But it's about creating the environment where people feel comfortable to make those small changes.

Fredrik 3:11

Yes, definitely. From a leader's perspective, it's all about that. It's about empowering people to feel that they are allowed to question things and do things differently and take time to reflect on how we could do things differently and be uh empowered to do so too. It's not just coming up with ideas, right? Creativity is coming up with ideas and making these ideas happen.

Keith 3:31

Yeah, I think that uh oftentimes that's where things are lost in the execution side of things. One other question I wanted that's uh related to that to ask you though, and that is about the differences across cultures. I know that your forthcoming book, there's 37 different countries in there, and I know you've been to lots more, but the ability to question the bosses isn't so easy in Asia, and I know you've lived in Asia. So, where do you see that little battle being won?

Culture Change: Fear, Permission, And Action

Fredrik 4:04

Well, uh, first of all, I don't think it's so difficult to change that behavior. I've heard so many examples of of cultures where there's been a terrible culture of fear or or a yes culture, and then they just change one leader and suddenly all these ideas come up. So it is possible to change. Sometimes people think it's impossible to change culture. Culture in a company takes time to change, but culture in a team can change with one leader. I also say it's very important if you are working in a company where you feel like no one is listening to your ideas and uh they are not encouraging innovation, yeah. And that's important to you, you just should change. But I I'm a storyteller. Can I tell you a story?

Keith 4:45

Yo, please do.

The Golden Paperclip Lesson On Missed Ideas

Fredrik 4:46

I did a speech once for the Norwegian Railway on their and they had an innovation day to encourage employees to come up with ideas, and they were rewarding the best ideas of the year. And they told me the backstory of this many years ago. They had a guy who worked in the company and he had invented a new way to attach the rails to the sleepers, right? Have you ever looked down on a railway? You can see there's like paper clips holding on to the trails. He is he's the guy who invented that before they used nails. And these clips are much more effective. So he invented that, he took a patent on it, and he went to his bosses and said, Look, I've invented a much better way of putting rails down on the ground. No one listened. He kept pushing it, no one listened. Finally, after years, he said, he went up to his boss and said, You know what? If you're not gonna do this, I'm gonna quit and I'm gonna do it. And the boss said, Okay, whatever. And he said, Well, then I want to bring, then I want the patent. And he said, Yeah, yeah, sure, whatever. And the guy left, took the patent, went straight, flew straight to England to one of the largest uh you know uh iron companies in the world, and sold the patent to them at a license. And he said, I want one cent per clip. But remember, there are four clips on every uh every meter, so you know it it ends up being a lot of money. So he made a lot of money, but in the contract, it said you can sell this, you have a global license, you can send it anywhere except Norway.

Keith 6:16

I love it. That's common.

Fredrik 6:18

That was basically it was basically him giving the finger to his own employee for not listening to his ideas. But here's the here's here's the funny catch. At the innovation day, this company gave away a prize, and the price was one of those paperclips painted gold. And the idea was we missed that idea, we don't want to miss the next one, which I think is a beautiful story.

Inspired Versus Taught: From Spark To Execution

Keith 6:38

Yeah, yeah, good reflection as well, then. So you you say then that um creativity is inspired, not taught. In leadership development, what's the danger of trying to teach creativity through frameworks and tools alone, then?

Curiosity As Care: Language Lessons For Leaders

Fredrik 6:57

Okay, yeah, the important word in that sentence is alone, then. Because some people need frameworks and techniques, uh or uh people are different. But to think that if you interview really creative people, and I have interviewed thousands, really, really creative people they don't do uh creativity exercises that they've learned in a book. So most really creative people are inspired to be creative. Now, the the trick for leaders is you know the word inspire literally means to breathe in, right? To inspire is to breathe in, to perspire is to breathe out. But inspiration just only means that you breathe in. It's like, oh, I have the I feel all the inspired. It's something doesn't happen. Respiration is the act of uh turning the oxygen into you in your lungs into useful things into your body. So creative respiration is much more important than creative inspiration, and that's what a boss can do. Creative respiration. I learned this from a guy, uh his uh head of customer service and HR at a luxe resort in the Maldives. He travels around the world and he looks at what other luxury hotels are doing. So, for example, let's say he's in Los Angeles and he sees a new kind of drink that is flammable or something. He takes a video and he sends it back to his um his staff in the Maldives. But he learned a lesson. He said, if I took sent every everything I saw and I just sent all of it back to them, I've overwhelmed them with ideas, but they don't have any time to do any time to work on it, right? So he said, I've learned to filter what I should send back to them. And when I go back to the Maldives, I go and I talk to them and said, which of these ideas inspired you and which of these should we try? And then they start mixing, then they start experimenting with, let's say, the different flammable uh drinks, and then they decide to introduce one of them. So creative respiration is when the leader decides how inspiration, how to make sure your people are inspired, but also how to make sure that that inspiration leads to action, which is the much more important part. A lot of people focus, oh, I'm gonna, they go to all the conferences, they're so they are so inspired, never do anything.

Keith 9:05

You've interviewed, as you said, thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people, and still say that curiosity is the defining trait of creative leaders. What happens to leadership when curiosity fades?

Role Modelling Improvisation Over Corporate Scripts

Fredrik 9:21

There's a big chapter in the book about curiosity. So I'll give you a different I'll we'll do a little language exercise because there's so many lessons here. The word curiosity has the root of cura from Latin, meaning to care, which means that which you care about, you will be curious about, right? Or that which you are curious about, you care about. If you don't care about Bitcoin, you're not going to be curious about Bitcoin, right? So that's how it works. So what happens if there's no curiosity in the leader? You are communicating, you don't care about the person, right? If if I'm if you're my boss and you are not and you are not curious about me, you don't ask any questions, you don't care about what I do, you are not curious, I feel you don't care about me. So, but if you are curious, and say, hey, hey Frederick, what are you working on? What's your biggest problem? Oh, now I feel like, oh, this guy really cares about me. So curiosity actually communicates that you care. So a good leader is is first of all perceived as someone who cares, which inspires people. But not only that, because the Bulgarian word for curiosity is lupiten, which means the love of asking questions. So a curious person asks questions. So if you go, if you're my boss and you come to me and say, Frederick, what's your biggest problem? What are you working on? Now you get so much more information than if you're just telling me what to do. So as a leader, you get much more informed about the actual status of the organization and what I am working on and what whatever customers are saying, whatever you're asking me about. And the third lesson is the Icelandic word for curious, which is for witten. And for means before, and witten means to know. So curious in Icelandic means that which comes before knowledge, meaning you can't really understand something unless you're curious about it. And the fourth one is the Swedish version of curiosity, which is ni fiken. Ni means new, fiken means an extreme need to uh to find out. So a need to find understand the new. And if leaders, all right, one of their main roles is uh to see the future, to be a visionary, to tell people where we're going. So curiosity, for example, AI, a couple of years ago as a leader, you should have been curious about AI because you should have seen it will affect a lot of the discussions that will happen in uh in 2025, 2026. There are what four or five different definitions of curious that all give different lessons in how curiosity is important for leadership.

Keith 11:43

It is, uh, and I get that, and I love the different explanations from the different languages, but all of them uh ultimately have a root in saying that they need to inspire you to look, to find out, to understand. So my question was: what happens if a leader loses that curiosity? They lose their inspiration.

Hæmskur: Escaping Industry And Geographic Bubbles

Fredrik 12:08

First of all, they lose the uh affinity to their people because they don't feel the people don't feel the leader is listening, they don't feel they care, and then second, you lose you lose the the uh the knowledge because you're not asking questions, and then you don't get the profound understanding of the business, and then you lose the visionary because you don't see the next thing that is coming. So all of this will be reduced, and then then you basically you're uh you're a leader in the dark.

Keith 12:35

Ha, actually, the way you just described it, you'd probably be fired.

Fredrik 12:42

Yeah, maybe, maybe I should.

Keith 12:44

Yeah, so uh is it fair to say though that many senior leaders they aren't short of intelligence or experience, but are quietly suffering from a lack of curiosity?

Fredrik 12:56

I don't think it's like it's a lack of curiosity. I think it's I think curiosity gets pushed back because they are overwhelmed with things they need to do or things they need think they need to do, uh, or responsibility, uh, or a lot of other things, or things they think the leader should be doing. If you ask people who is the best leader you ever had, or who's the best teacher you ever had, it's the curious ones that come up, pop up.

Keith 13:22

Right.

Fredrik 13:22

I'll tell you another story about how you inspire curiosity and creativity in the people. I did a speech for a media organization in Singapore, and it was also an Innovation Day. So it was I was speaking, and then the the the CEO was speaking at an innovation day, 300 people in the audience. So he goes up and he has a piece of paper and he's reading a piece of paper. It's clearly it's a written speech, and it's not written by him, you can tell. So it's like we are gathered here, we are gathered here today to celebrate the power of creativity and innovation. It's like, and you can just feel the energy in the room just it's just going down, right? It's like this is just corporate bullshit, basically. Then suddenly he looks up and he says, What am I doing? This is an innovation day, and I'm reading a speech I clearly didn't write myself. And it and he I could tell it was not rehearsed because I was sitting next to the person who wrote the speech, and and he went, Ah! He took the pitch, he crumbled it, he threw it away, and he said, 'You know what? Never mind this speech. Let me tell you a story. Let me tell you of the first boss I ever had at Chungi Airport, and then he started telling the story. And you could just feel the room change. Yeah, because here was a leader who wasn't just following following procedure and doing things prepared. This is a guy who's improvising, the CEO was improvising and just telling stories. And you everyone then felt like, oh, okay, if the CEO can do this, I can improvise too. So leadership is a lot about role modeling.

Keith 14:48

Even if they had practiced and rehearsed that, it would have been very powerful. But it sounds like it was real, and people in the audience would have been drawn into that as well, undoubtedly, right?

Fredrik 15:00

Oh, yeah, but even better when it's improvised.

Stretching Perspective Without Getting On A Plane

Keith 15:03

Yeah, for sure. I love how you use other languages and words and find the different ways. So, one I I like to ask you about the Icelandic idea of hemsker that never leaving your home makes you intellectually poorer. It's confronting. Where do you see leaders becoming hemscure in modern organizations?

Fredrik 15:27

Yes, a hemsker goes all the way back to the Vikings. If you were a Viking, you're supposed to build a ship and sail south and steal as much as you could, you know, steal gold and silver and and uh weapons, but more importantly, more importantly, you're supposed to steal ideas. How do they farm in England? How do they make weapons in Turkey? And then you bring those ideas back to your farm on Iceland. If you didn't do that, you were a Haimsker, and Haimsker, as you said, means well, yeah in my book I use the word stupid because that's the word they told me. And the important part of this, I you said the meaning of a word, Haimskur. Haim means home. Meaning, the meaning is someone who always stays on their farm, becomes stupid because they are not inspired by new ideas. When I do seminars, I talk a lot about how you can be in Heimskur within your industry. So, for example, people in the car industry they tend to go to car exhibitions, they learn from other car companies, but that is the same industry. They should go and they should go to a hotel management conference or a cybersecurity conference or an airline conference, and they should learn what they are talking about at the moment that we can incorporate into cars. A lot of industries suffer from hemsker because they only learn from it in shadow. I call that idea incest, and that's exactly what it is.

Keith 16:48

And I can actually identify that in myself since retiring from corporate life in the car industry six years ago. I've learned more in the last six years than I did in the previous 20 because I'm exposed through my coaching to people from different industries. So I get a different perspective, a different idea. My only regret is that I didn't know this then. I was a bit too hemscure.

Bispective: Seeing From Both Sides

Fredrik 17:18

There you go. Exactly. And why do you think that wasn't? Why do you think you were in that bubble? Because not only you, it's so common.

Keith 17:28

Now it does depend on the company and the culture, and I don't mind naming them now. When I worked for a Dutch company, Axonabel, they're very open to ideas, very creative, very curious by nature. Then I worked for uh a US car parts company, which doesn't exist as it was, it was Federal Mogul, it's now uh Tenneco, and I'm sure it's different now, but it was so focused on just the quarterly results, and anything that you did that was outside the ordinary, outside the norm, was considered a waste. You must be wasting time, you're not focused on the bottom line, literally. And I think that what was lacking then because of that was this ability to be curious, to do something different.

Fredrik 18:14

Yeah, and and Haimesker can also be not just outside your own industry, you can also just geographically locate that's where travel becomes. How do if you let's say uh I don't know, let's say you're in the chair industry, uh go and look at how do they how are they how are they selling chairs in Brazil, in South Africa, in India, just to get different ideas. So different just new perspectives is so crucial because it forces your brain to look at the world in a different way.

Keith 18:44

Absolutely, and uh I've worked and lived in six countries. Uh, probably the best has been when I've been in Asia, because you have such a cluster of very different countries with different ideas, cultures, and ways of working. So every trip is a learning. And I've traveled a lot, but nowhere near as much as you have, and that's why I know your book, which is about to be launched, is gonna be so interesting because of the vast wealth of cultural experience that you bring to bear.

Opportunity, Doldrums, And Acting On The Wind

Fredrik 19:17

Yes, and I think the most important lesson from that, actually, when this comes out, the book is already out the world of creativity. But the one in the beginning of the book, I talk about the most valuable lesson from traveling so much, because I've been to 75 countries. The most valuable thing is actually that you start to question what you thought you knew.

Keith 19:35

Right.

Fredrik 19:35

That you realize that the one the one thing that you know about how the world works is not always is very seldom the best way. There are many other ways of doing things. And that's a different kind of curiosity. I kind of think it it's a bug in the human DNA that we are not more open to best practices from other people, other cultures, which we tribal. When someone has come up with a better way of doing Something and why don't we just adopt that? Like it doesn't make sense.

Keith 20:05

Absolutely. And can I tell?

Fredrik 20:07

I'll tell you a story. I can tell you a story. Because I lived in Sweden in Singapore for many years, and you you know this. In Singapore, if you land in the airport, it's the passport control is all automatic. Like you just put in the machine and they check you for via AI and whatever, and out you go. In Sweden, we don't have a single airport that has a single one of these machines. Everyone that checks an air a passport in Sweden is manually checked by human beings.

Keith 20:31

Even now?

Fredrik 20:32

Still to 2020 uh 2026.

Keith 20:35

Still, not a I have to ask you when when were you last in Singapore?

Fredrik 20:39

Oh like a few months ago.

Keith 20:41

Yeah, it's passport free now. You don't take your passport out of your pocket. It's just facial recognition and walk through.

Curiosity As Antidote To Polarisation

Fredrik 20:49

Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Even better, right? But I I don't live there, so I don't think it works for me. But that that's great, even better, right? And Sweden doesn't even have the machine there, you put it in. So I go up to this, I know, I go up to the Swedish passport police because the lines are 30 minutes long, 40 minutes long, suddenly, right? Because a human needs to look at a passport. Actually, it doesn't even look at it, puts it in the machine. So I go up to them and said, excuse me, uh Singapore's been doing this for day for decades. Why are Sweden not doing it? And they said, uh then I went home and Googled it. Turns out Mongolia have these machines. Mongolia! How can Mongolia have something that Sweden doesn't have? So I walk walk up to them and I say, excuse me, Mongolia has these machines. Why don't we have it in Sweden? And they said, Oh, that's so cute. No, that's not so cute. It's it's stupid that Sweden still hasn't adapted this. And they and then if they did, they have all these people that could actually do proper border control instead of looking at passports. It's not an attack on Sweden. It's this this is like why is what's in the human DNA that doesn't make the person in charge of passport control in Sweden say, hmm, wonder what every anyone else is doing, and maybe we could copy that and become more efficient.

Uncertainty Demands Creativity, Not Control

Keith 22:07

So for leaders who cannot step outside of their world uh physically for whatever reason, how can they create the same creative stretch without getting on a plane? And I'm not talking Google and AI, but what actions could a leader take who uh who is restricted and they're stuck at their desk, for example?

From Expert To Explorer: Identity Shift

Fredrik 22:29

Why did you say not Google and not AI? I think Google is amazing for doing that. I think AI is amazing for doing that. Amazing AI is great at changing your perspective because you can now tell the AI I want you to take the role of an Indian entrepreneur and teach me something about chair selling. Or I want you to question everything I say. AI is great as a creativity tool. Google is great if you don't want to travel. You can Google Italian chair design, you don't have to go to Italy anymore. You can you get a million hits on Google for if you want to know about Italian chair designs. So those are both good tools. What can you do? You can take a different route to work. I mean, do some go to the tourist information in your hometown and say, what is an I what is an uh an unknown tourist attraction in my city and go there and just do something differently, just anything.

Keith 23:18

Yeah, how unbelievable. And uh you may not know this, but I uh trained as a clinical hypnotherapist. And one of the things we use to explain to someone who's been hypnotized for the first time is that you are in a hypnotic trance almost every day. And the one example we give is the drive to work, where oftentimes you get to work, you don't even remember passing a traffic light, a landmark. It is literally just honed into your subconscious. So that's a great idea, and I follow the sat nav, I'm gonna take a different route home tonight just on the basis of what you said there for sure, just to see something different.

Quick Fire: Advice, Cultures, Books, And Traits

Fredrik 24:03

That was very interesting. And I interviewed a tourist guide in, I think it was Latvia or yeah, I think it was Riga or somewhere there. Uh, and and he's a local tourist guide, and he would go around in the city, and whenever an old person came out of their house, go up to them and give them a compliment so that they felt happy, and they say, Oh, by the way, tell me something about this neighborhood. And then he would find out all these little stories that everyone had forgotten, and then he would tell, then we'd organise city tours for the people who lived in that city and tell the stories that no one knew about that city that they lived in.

Keith 24:36

I remember as a teenager, I don't know why they did this. My my hometown of Mertha Tidville in South Wales, which is full of heritage and history, but most of us didn't know it. The town council had this brilliant idea. They had a recently retired bus driver, and he became the guide on a bus on a tour of the locality, and nobody knew it better than him. And there was some disquiet initially about oh, why didn't you have a professional guide? There was no one better than this guy because one thing we have in South Wales is we are nosy, curious, we can't help ourselves. So he was very nosy, so he asked things and he learned things over the years, and it turned out to be one of the best guides I've ever been on any tour with in my life, and that was my hometown.

Fredrik 25:32

That is great, and that kind of gives me an idea that whenever someone retires from a company, HR should sit down with them and tell and say, tell tell me all the stories that uh will be lost when you leave. Imagine doing that. That would be a nice exit. That would be the nice exit interview.

Keith 25:49

That's better than how was it here, how was the tea, how was the coffee, etc. Brilliant. I like that. Any HR listening to this, take that. That's a brilliant idea, Frederick just gave you for free. So we've spoken, we've alluded to your book a few times. So your latest book, The World of Creativity, you introduce this word, I love this word, bispective, described as lived experience of both sides of a system. Why is this such an undeveloped capability in leadership and what does it unlock when it's present?

Closing Reflections: Stay Curious, Lead Consciously

Fredrik 26:25

So it bispective is a made-up word, uh, which is a play on words on perspective. So perspective is that you see something from a point of view. Bispective by meaning too means you now see things from both sides. For example, let's say you you start a podcast and now you are a podcast host and you do 100 podcasts, you have you have a perspective on podcasting, but if you then go on and be a guest on one podcast, suddenly you have a bispective on podcasting, you've seen it from both sides. Or if you're a salesperson and you work in sales all your life, and then you work move into procurement, and then you now you have a bispective on on the perspective of selling and buying. And when you have that, you can see things from both sides. Meaning, let's say someone is you move to procurement, and then the salesperson is starting to use all this sales technique on you. Now you know, oh, he's using that technique, I know that, I used to use that one. So you haven't you have the understanding of both sides, which makes you more empathetic to the other person because you can you have literally been in their shoes. So bispective is a superpower, and everyone has bispective in something. So the key here in the book is to reflect on what do you have per bispective on. As I'm a keynote speaker, I've done over 2,000 speeches, but then I was asked to organize a conference, and suddenly it's like I asked people to send in your slides, please, and no one did. And then I reminded them send me the slides, please, no one did. And then finally, I was like, please send me your slides. And now then suddenly I realized the frustration from the event organizer for why you need to send in the slides the first time because there's a million other things to do right before the conference starts. I don't want to spend time reminding you of it. So I got a bispective on conference organizing from both as a keto speaker and as an organizer. Think about what do you have bispective on because that gives you a unique way of looking at the world in that area.

Keith 28:15

And if you don't have that bispective, then set out to get it.

Fredrik 28:20

Exactly. I don't know. Maybe for leadership, it's it's easy, right? Yeah, most people have first had a manager and then they become managers. But when you become a manager, you now you get perspective on leadership. Before you did it, you're just complaining about the leader all the time. Why that doesn't they listen? Why don't they have time for me? And oh, okay, it's because there it's so much work to do. It's hard to be a leader, and now you suddenly have more empathy for your next boss.

Keith 28:45

Yeah, for sure.

Fredrik 28:46

Or parenthood is the great example. When you get your kid, when you get your first kid, you get bispective on parenthood instead of just looking up at your parents and saying, Why did they do it like this? Oh, okay, now now I understand.

Keith 28:57

Yeah, for sure. And by the way, I think the perspective is such a great word. I hope it gets captured by the Oxford English Dictionary for next year. And uh I I love made up made-up words. I had a boss, Alex Davis's name was, and he had this beautiful phrase, a made-up word, that I it captured for me everything we needed to do opportunity, which is like a chance and an opportunity in one. And it just when he mentioned that, you knew he was saying this is something to go for. It's almost a signal to go. So I love made-up words because all words are made up at some point, right? Exactly.

Fredrik 29:38

Do you know the uh origin of the word opportunity?

Keith 29:40

I don't.

Fredrik 29:41

Oh, I love to tell this story. That it's a name of a wind, you know, like you have the wind breeze or storm or typhoon. Different winds have different names. Opportunity is a specific kind of wind, it means the wind that brings you back to the harbor. So it's a Roman word. So in the Roman times, you're out on the sea, you're almost dying, you're in the doldrums, no wind, and suddenly here came opportunity, the right wind that will bring you back to the harbor. It's also so symbolic because it shows that opportunities don't necessarily mean that you you need to still grasp them, right? You need to hoist the sails. So when you feel that opportunity, oh, look, it's you have to recognize an opportunity, oh, that's the right kind of wind. And then you need to wake everyone up and say, hey, opportunity is here, race, start sailing, because otherwise we're gonna miss it. So that's where the grasping of an opportunity comes in. It means hoisting the sails to get you home to your family, isn't it beautiful?

Keith 30:35

It's absolutely amazing, and you also used a word there the first time I've heard it used in its proper sense, the doldrums. We have now used that for if you're stuck somewhere, but it it literally means where you've lost wind at sea and you're sitting there, you're in the doldrums, right? So that's the first time I've heard it in its proper context. Still live in a fairly polarized world. Do you think a lack of bispective thinking is now a bigger leadership risk uh than perhaps a lack of technical competence?

Fredrik 31:09

I'd say that curiosity is the antidote to the problem of uh polarized. Polarized in itself is not a problem. You're going out to sea, and someone says, we can't do it, it's too dangerous, and someone else says, Oh, it's okay, the wind is not so strong. That's a polarizing discussion, but now we have to decide, but then we have to the curiosity comes in. Oh well, why do you think, why do you think that it's dangerous? Oh, because and you know now we're arguing. So a polarized discussion fueled by curiosity is the best there is. The problem with polarizing is that people are not curious about the other side. Right.

Keith 31:50

Yeah.

Fredrik 31:51

That's that that's what we mean when we say polarized, but that's not the meaning of the world. I mean, for me, polarized means like this we have two poles, right? But let's let's go to the other one and see what's there. Let's be that's why I'm the creativity explorer. Let's explore what's on the other pole.

Keith 32:05

And I should have introduced you as the creativity explorer, which you're well known as. Many leaders say that they they want creativity but struggle with control, and they also struggle with predictability and certainty. What inner shift does a leader need to have to truly allow creativity to emerge in their team?

Fredrik 32:29

These times are extremely uh uh they're changing a lot, it's unclear, we don't know what's gonna happen, uh tariffs here, wars here, up and down. The world is extremely uncertain. This is how nature works. If you live in a world that doesn't change, nature still changes, but we we do mutations, but if the mutation is not better than before, it will die out. But if the world is changing quickly, we have to mutate, or we are going to die out, right? So I don't think it's not a it's not a question of how do I handle the this this uh creativity of my people. It's the opposite. How do I handle the fact that people are not being creative because the world is changing and we are not, right? That's the problem. The world is turning and we are going straight. That's that's a recipe for disaster.

Keith 33:20

Absolutely. No, you're spot on. So after for you, quarter of a century, 75 plus countries, thousands of conversations. How has this exploration of creativity changed you, Frederick, as a human being, not just as a thinker or speaker?

Fredrik 33:42

So for 20 years I defined myself as an expert. Uh I was a creativity expert. And then my son actually came up with the creativity explorer because he was going to introduce uh, you know, he got the question, what does your father do for a living? And he was supposed to say, My father's a creativity expert, but he said, My father is a creativity explorer, and I loved it. So I just adopted it. Because explore means to venture into unknown territory in order to learn more about it, meaning an explorer doesn't have the answers. An explorer has the questions, right? An expert has the answers, an explorer has the questions. And that is the that is the biggest change that happened in my life. When I said I'm gonna go from being someone who has all the answers to I'm gonna be the one who has the questions. And I'm not gonna have, I'm not, uh, I can still give answers, but I'm not gonna define myself as the one who has the answers. I'm gonna define myself as the one who has the questions. I became more humble, I became more curious, I became more interested in other people, uh, I became less sure about how the state of the world and what I know. Everything uh I think were were positive changes.

Keith 34:45

So you had your son to help you to find that. Yes. For me, it was retirement from corporate life that caused me to find that curiosity again because I didn't know. Whereas when you're a leader in a particular industry, there is an expectation that you are the expert. I wasn't, but anyway, there's an expectation. But now I enter every discussion, every meeting, every new network event that I attend with a curiosity. And I know that the most powerful thing I have in my armory is not my expertise, but my curiosity and my ability to question. Once you realize a question is your best friend, life becomes much, much more interesting, right?

Fredrik 35:31

I think what you just said there is the maybe the most beautiful definition of retirement I've ever heard. Because it like it basically, the way I heard it, is like retire means recalibrate to becoming a learner again, to be like becoming the novice and say just you just to be curious, and now I can just be curious about the things I don't know. It's a beautiful way of looking at retirement, probably the most healthy way to look at retirement too.

Keith 35:56

Absolutely. First two years were awful, but since then the curiosity has taken me that I'm now busier than when I was working, so I don't know what retirement is. I'm I'm heading to Greece next month for five weeks to write a book. I'd never have even imagined doing something like that uh uh when I was in corporate life. Yeah, beautiful. I love to take a leaf out of your book on creativity. I decided to I've not done this before, mix things up a little bit and surprise you with some quick fire questions to wrap up this show.

Fredrik 36:28

Let's go, let's do it.

Keith 36:29

Are you ready?

Fredrik 36:30

Okay, good. I'm ready.

Keith 36:32

Shoot. Best advice you've ever received.

Fredrik 36:35

My mother, when I when I had children, I said, I'm a creativity expert, but I don't know anything about children. How do I raise creative children? And my mother said, Never give the answer. Because when a child is gonna ask you questions and parents always give the answer. Why is the earth round? And it's like, and then you just start asking answering the question. But you should say, What do you think? Because now you're teaching your child that creativity is not about asking questions, it's about asking questions and finding answers. And we can parents kill that. So it works beautifully for leaders. A leader sits at her desk or his desk, someone comes in, hey, how should I do this? What do you think? Just say that, just turn it around on them. Uh and it works brilliantly. And then the kid comes up with answers, they're usually better than your own answer, and then you can still give the answer if you want. Just hold back for 30 seconds and say, What do you think? It's it's a simple advice, but I've used it on my kids, and it's it's the best advice.

Keith 37:30

I think everyone could take one piece of advice from where you just said there as well. Just pausing in anything for a few seconds. Yeah, exactly. Just doing that alone would dramatically improve everything you do, right? Okay, most creative culture you've ever seen.

Fredrik 37:48

I really like Iceland, I have to say. I did a speech recently in Iceland at the HR Management Conference in Iceland. There are four less than 400,000 people in Iceland, and they had more than a thousand people there. Wow. Almost like 1500, I think. 1,500 on 400,000. That's a big chunk of the population. And they said, oh yeah, unfortunately, there's another big conference happening at the same time. I said, what the hell? What's going on? It's by must be by far the largest HR conference in the world per capita. Why were they there? And then they were so curious. Okay, maybe it's the Hamsker mentality of them, but they are, they just want to learn. It it's there are two kinds of island. People talk about island mentality as in people are insular and they never leave and they can are not open to new ideas. But there are two kinds of island mentality. The other one is the Icelandic one, like the movie, the Moana. Like I need to get out and see what's out there.

Keith 38:39

Okay, so what's the book every leader should read? And I know your forthcoming book will probably be your answer, but other than that.

Fredrik 38:47

Well, okay, that's tricky because I don't read uh management literature because I have a bad memory and I like stories, so I'm afraid I'm gonna read a story in a book and then start telling that story as some a story I've heard and then be accused of plagiarizing someone else's book. So I don't read other management books. So so I read so I would say, you know, read a book. My answer will be read a book that is not a business book or a management book. And I say that as an author of leadership books. I've written a novel which is called The Unvisible, which is about what it means to be human. If you only have to read one book from me, don't buy the world of creativity, buy the unvisible. That's going to teach you more about important lessons in life than my business book. See, here I am arguing against buying my business.

Keith 39:33

Yeah, yeah. So I don't necessarily mean a business book, just any book that you would say every leader should read.

Fredrik 39:44

The only book I reread is the book Influence, Science and Practice by Gilliani or something like this. It's a psychology professor who got bored of being cheated by salespeople, so he took a bunch of sales courses to learn. The techniques so that you now know which techniques they're using on you. But you can read that book also on how to influence other people. It is brilliant. It's a very funny book, full of examples of how to influence people. And that's that book should be read by every child in school and every human being to learn not to be fooled by other people using these techniques on you.

Keith 40:20

Okay, brilliant. Um, idea you wish more leaders understood. The power of listening. One word that describes great leadership.

Fredrik 40:32

Listeners. No, that's boring. But we talked about it. Curiosity. I I would say because curiosity is much more powerful than listening, because curiosity is listening and caring. It involves both of those.

Keith 40:46

What was the first job you ever thought perhaps as a child you might end up doing?

Fredrik 40:52

Yeah, I was not gonna say the first, but the when I started thinking about my career, I said advertising because I knew I I knew I loved creativity, but then I realized I'm dyslectic, I can't be a copywriter, I can't draw, I can't be an art director, and I'm unorganized, I can't be a product manager or a customer relations manager. So all the jobs were like I was lost. And I was like, ah, too bad, I can't have a creative job. But then I realized later in life, well, I can just study creativity itself. So there you go.

Keith 41:19

Finally, and in closing, if you had to change your career today, knowing all you know, but you can't be the creativity explorer, what would you be?

Fredrik 41:29

That's a good one because during the pandemic, my my industry died. So I had a couple of years to think about what I should do if I can if this never comes back. The sad answer is I didn't come up with anything remotely as uh uh appealing as doing what I do. I've had that discussion, internal discussion with myself. I did not come up with the good answer, unfortunately. If you force me at gunpoint to say something, I'd probably say um I'd probably say politician. But that comes way down on the list.

Keith 42:02

Interestingly, you arrived at the conclusion there was nothing better than you do now. How good is that?

Fredrik 42:10

That is good. That is good.

Keith 42:11

So let's finish on that positive note. You're doing what you love and you wouldn't want to do anything else other than being the creativity explorer. Thank you very much for being on the Power Within. Thank you, Frederick, uh, for joining me today and reminding us that creativity isn't something that we add to leadership, it's something we uncover when we slow down, stay curious, and step beyond what's familiar. Perhaps the real work isn't finding better answers, but as you said, learning to ask better questions. So the message today is stay curious, lead consciously, that's the power within.