Last week I restacked a line from psychologist Todd Kashdan, who was writing about George Loewenstein’s 1994 paper on curiosity, the one that reorganized the whole field. Curiosity is one of my core values. I was hooked.
Loewenstein’s idea was simple and strange. Curiosity is not a personality sparkle. It is a form of deprivation. It arrives the instant you notice a gap between what you know and what you want to know, and it feels less like delight than like an itch.
Buried in that account is a darker prediction, and Kashdan named it in one sentence: “The itch does not care whether the scratch is good for you.”
If curiosity is the pain of the gap rather than the pleasure of the answer, people will close gaps fast in ways that have nothing to do with closing them well.
I see this in leaders constantly. The quick reply that ends the thread but not the question. The decision made to stop the meeting rather than settle the matter. The dashboard glanced at, not read. Each one scratches the itch. None of them closes the gap.
But the more I sat with Loewenstein’s model, the more I noticed something it doesn’t describe.
In his account, curiosity fades because the gap closes. You learn the answer. The deprivation resolves. That’s the happy ending: satisfied curiosity.
That is not what I watch happening on executive teams.
Their gaps don’t close. They get displaced. A leader opens a real question in the morning, something worth being curious about, and by ten o’clock something louder has arrived and pushed it out of frame. Then something newer pushes that one. The original question is still open. Nobody is looking at it anymore.
I’ve spent this year writing about ambient urgency, the always-on condition where urgency stops being information and becomes the weather. Here is what it does to curiosity: it guarantees that almost no gap stays open long enough to resolve. The curiosity doesn’t get satisfied. It gets abandoned.
Satisfied curiosity and abandoned curiosity look identical on a calendar. Both end. Only one produced anything.
The cost is usually invisible, because you do get an answer. The fast scratch produces something: a number, a reply, a decision. What it costs you is the second-order answer. You learn enough to satisfy the need in the moment, and not enough to compound for the future. The leader who skims the dashboard learns that the quarter is fine. The leader who holds the gap learns why, and that answer is still working for her three quarters later. Displacement does not steal the answer. It steals what the answer would have become.
Ambient urgency is the weather in this story: the outside force that does the displacing. But the weather has an accomplice, and it’s internal. An open gap is ambiguity. Living inside one is uncomfortable by design; that is what deprivation means. So the fast scratch is not only a response to urgency. It is ambiguity relief. The displacement wins partly because some part of us wants it to win. I wrote last month about the tendencies that pull against each other in the leaders who scale, and comfort with ambiguity is the one that decides this contest. The leaders who hold a gap open are not less itchy than everyone else. They have built more tolerance for the itch.
This matters more than it might seem, because of another feature of Loewenstein’s model. Curiosity rises as you learn. The more you know about a subject, the more precisely you can see what you’re still missing, which is why curiosity peaks not at the beginning of learning but somewhere in the middle. Expertise doesn’t exhaust curiosity. It sharpens it.
But only if you stay in the gap long enough to climb.
A team that abandons every gap at the shallow end never reaches the part of the curve where the good questions live. They experience the deprivation over and over, all itch, no resolution, and they slowly conclude that curiosity is a luxury for people with quieter jobs. It isn’t. Their curiosity is intact. Their gaps keep getting stolen.
Here is the part I care about most. None of this displacement is decided. No one chooses to abandon the morning’s question. It happens the way weather happens, without a decision, which means it never gets examined. So the countermove is not more discipline or better time management. It is converting an unconscious pattern into conscious decision making.
This is why I run a parking lot in the meetings I facilitate. Most people think the parking lot is a device for staying on schedule. It is actually a device for making displacement conscious. When a big question gets pushed out of frame by something louder, it gets parked by name, in public, with a commitment to return. The displacement still happens. What changes is that the abandonment becomes a decision instead of an accident.
The personal version is a ledger of abandoned questions. Not a task list. A list of the gaps that got displaced before they resolved. Most, on inspection, deserve to stay abandoned. Decide that on purpose. One or two, reopened deliberately, will turn out to be the most important thinking you do that month.
And at the end of the week, sort what you closed from what you merely ended. The thread that stopped is not the same as the question that got answered. Naming the difference takes thirty seconds and tells you exactly where the itch got scratched badly.
You can’t make the itch care whether the scratch is good for you. Loewenstein settled that thirty years ago. What you can do is choose, consciously, which gaps to abandon and which to reopen, and protect the reopened ones from the weather.
Fewer gaps, held longer, chosen on purpose. That’s the whole move.
Take good care,
Karen