Hey there, I’m Scott.

I’m a strategist, executive, social entrepreneur, business advisor, and philosopher. My passion in life is to make the world a little bit more curious.

Over the course of my 20-odd-year career, I’ve had the privilege of working with corporations, governments, and not-for-profits alike. I have looked after major multi-disciplinary projects, run organisations, coached leaders and business owners, and founded my own social enterprise. You can read more about me here.

But throughout my life, the one characteristic that’s come to define me is my passion for practising and cultivating curiosity.

And I’m not ashamed to say that it took my entire career to come to that realisation.

It’s taken me years to understand why I do what I do, what makes me tick, and the way I feel. When I look back at everything I’ve accomplished or failed at, the one universal habit I’ve adopted is a practice of reflection: “Huh, I wonder why I did that?”

Over time and with each reflection point, I’ve added new lens through which I better understand myself, others, and the world.

Adopting the Curiosity Mindset

I believe curiosity is an innate superpower we all possess (just ask anyone with kids). But without nurturing this practice more deeply, we deprive ourselves of all the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual tools we need to navigate uncertainty in our lives.

My hope is that through this Substack, we can build a community of people who are seeking to cultivate our curiosity more deeply so that we can better tackle wicked problems and make meaningful progress in our lives, our work, and our communities.

But I won’t just be covering topics related to curiosity; I’ll also be exploring various topics of philosophy, meaning-making, systems thinking, epistemology and phenomenology, and how they apply to various issues across leadership, business, culture, group dynamics, social challenges, and politics.

Here are some topics you can expect to see:

• The iterative lifecycle of curiosity and how we learn new things

• The infinite valleys of the Dunning-Kruger effect

• The role of ‘play’

• The dangers of readily available answers

• Conscious consumption of information

• Why the quest for better leadership might be a trap

• How we lie to ourselves and others (and why that might be important)

• Is everything a social construct?

• How judgment is a triggered reaction arising from a mismatch of expectations

• What does it mean to ‘change the system’?

• When might it be inappropriate to be curious

Thanks for visiting, and I look forward to having some wonderful discussions with you.