Why Top Leadership Firms Are Measuring Curiosity In The AI Era

Why This Focus On Curiosity Matters To You, Not Just The Industry

Curiosity has become common language in a lot of leadership bios lately, so it would be easy to read this as another trend piece and move on. Here is why I’d ask you to slow down instead. Several competing firms, the ones companies hire to help identify and develop their future leaders, have built curiosity into how they evaluate leadership potential and AI readiness. That should matter to you, whether or not you’ll ever sit across from one of these firms, because the differences between their definitions reveal where your own curiosity may be helping or limiting you.

Korn Ferry Built Curiosity Into Its AI Readiness Model

Korn Ferry has developed what it calls the AI-Ready Leader Success Profile, designed to identify which leaders are genuinely prepared to guide their organizations through AI adoption. Among the traits it explicitly measures is a category the firm describes as future-focused thinking, leaders who stay curious, explore what is possible, and help their teams see how AI can unlock new potential. Korn Ferry found that nearly every leader expects AI to disrupt their industry, yet only 11% of talent leaders believe their leadership teams are well prepared for it. What Cashman told me years ago helps explain why that gap can persist. Leaders may explore AI long enough to form an opinion, then stop asking whether new evidence should change it. Ask yourself where your own AI opinions came from and when you last updated them, since the answer says more about your readiness than the opinion itself.

Russell Reynolds And Egon Zehnder Measure Curiosity Too

Russell Reynolds Associates built a parallel framework called AI Quotient, which measures a leader’s AI readiness, curiosity, and adaptability together as a single package, treating curiosity as a core part of AI readiness rather than a secondary leadership trait. Egon Zehnder arrived at this territory well over a decade earlier. Its Potential model, first published in Harvard Business Review, has long named curiosity as one of only four traits predicting whether a leader keeps growing into bigger roles, and the firm continues building on that thinking through dedicated work on what it calls the call for curiosity in leadership. Between the two, there is a useful lesson: curiosity has limited value unless it changes how you respond when new information challenges your existing approach.

Heidrick & Struggles Quantifies Curiosity Directly

Heidrick & Struggles includes curiosity as one of four named predictors in its Agile Leader Potential assessment, defined specifically as a person’s tendency to seek new experiences, learning opportunities, and alternative ways of thinking. This framework scores curiosity directly, giving the firm a specific measure of whether a leader can adapt quickly enough to keep pace with a changing role. That definition is useful because you can seek new experiences while remaining closed to new ways of thinking, and the two are not the same skill.

Spencer Stuart’s Curiosity Research Points To The Risk Of Past Playbooks

Spencer Stuart’s contribution comes from a different angle, and it happens to be close to what I’ve spent much of my own career studying. In a multi-year study of S&P 500 CEOs, the firm’s own researchers found that leaders who ran more than one company typically performed better in their first role than their second. The firm warned that familiar playbooks and established mental models can limit a leader’s willingness to keep learning. When Spencer Stuart asked its highest-performing repeat CEOs what separated their stronger stretches from their weaker ones, the answer came back consistently as insatiable curiosity and a desire for learning. One CEO in their research described trading a playbook full of actions for one full of questions, echoing almost exactly how Welch once described the CMOs he most wanted to place. If you have already succeeded once, this may be the most useful warning in the article: the playbook that helped create your first success can limit the next one when you stop questioning it.

What Their Public Curiosity Models Do Not Yet Explain

Several of the most influential firms in leadership advisory, working independently and using different language, have converged on a similar conclusion. Curiosity is becoming a capability these firms connect with leadership potential, agility, AI readiness, and sustained performance, rather than a quality they simply praise.

The harder question left standing is why curiosity varies so much between two leaders who look identical on paper, or why you could be curious enough to win a role the first time and lose that instinct by the second. My own peer-reviewed research, published in Heliyon, developed and validated a tool that measures four factors that can inhibit curiosity in working adults: fear, assumptions, technology, and environment. That work offers another way to understand why leaders who value curiosity may still fail to demonstrate it consistently. Established assumptions are one possible barrier, along with fear, technology habits, and the surrounding environment. In a separate exploratory study of C-suite executives, respondents also associated curiosity-driven initiatives with substantial financial savings, suggesting this capability carries consequences beyond leadership style. Naming curiosity as valuable turns out to be the more straightforward half of the problem these firms have identified. The harder question for you is which of these four factors is shaping your behavior before you assume the answer is simply to become more curious.

Why Top Leadership Firms Are Measuring Curiosity For The AI Era

These firms are giving curiosity a larger role in leadership assessment because AI increases the risk of relying on fixed answers, familiar mental models, and past experience. Their work shows curiosity becoming a capability organizations are willing to identify and, in several cases, score directly. The next challenge is understanding what suppresses curiosity in otherwise capable leaders and what can restore it. Before deciding that you need more curiosity, identify what is blocking the curiosity you already have.