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In this episode of the Better Finance: CFO Insights podcast, Myles Corson speaks with Simon Brown, EY Global Learning and Development Leader, about how CFOs can lead with curiosity to drive innovation.
In this episode of the Better Finance: CFO Insights podcast, host Myles Corson speaks with Simon Brown, EY Global Learning and Development Leader and co-author of The Curious Advantage. Drawing on years of research into learning, leadership and behavioral science, Simon explains how embedding curiosity into everyday practices can help finance teams evolve beyond traditional ways of working.
The conversation explores how a mindset of curiosity can help CFOs lead through uncertainty and respond to emerging challenges. Through real-world examples, Simon illustrates how asking better questions, creating space for exploration and staying open to different perspectives can uncover opportunities that might otherwise be missed.
The conversation reframes curiosity as a leadership behavior that fosters stronger connections across the business and supports a culture of continuous learning.
Key takeaways:
Explore how curiosity can help CFOs strengthen decision-making, build collaboration and foster trust.
Understand how asking better questions can guide teams through complexity with greater clarity and confidence.
Learn how psychological safety and a culture of experimentation can strengthen resilience and spark innovation in finance.
Discover ways to embed curiosity into everyday leadership behaviors and continuous learning practices.
For your convenience, full text transcript of this podcast is also available.
Myles Corson
You’re listening to the EY Better Finance: CFO Insights podcast — a series that explores the changing dynamics of the business world and what it means for finance leaders of today and tomorrow. I’m your host, Myles Corson, from EY.
In this episode, we’re exploring how curiosity can become a powerful leadership capability — helping finance leaders look beyond the numbers, challenge assumptions and open new possibilities.
To help unpack this, I’m joined by Simon Brown, EY Global Learning and Development Leader and co-creator of The Curious Advantage book and related podcast. Simon’s career has centered on building cultures that encourage people to ask questions, learn and experiment, while helping leaders apply curiosity to drive innovation and performance.
So, let’s jump straight in!
Corson
To get started, maybe you can talk about your personal career journey and what really got you interested in curiosity and how you got to that place.
Simon Brown
Many years in the learning world in different guises, from setting up my own organization to being in-house in learning to consulting with large organizations around learning, and, I guess, the deeper interest in curiosity came in my previous organization, where I was working for a global pharma company. There, we had a new culture that was around being inspired, curious and unbossed.
And leading learning there, we were involved very heavily in their curious element of that. So, how do we actually generate a culture where people can be curious, people can ask questions, people can learn? And so, after several years of doing that, someone commented that you should write a book about it.
So, that led me to then dive deeper into the research and collaborate with a couple of friends, and we ended up writing a book called The Curious Advantage, all around the power and value of being more curious.
Corson
You talked about this cultural transformation that your previous employer embarked on. Were there moments in that journey where you really saw the power of curiosity coming to the fore and where it really became tangible for you?
Brown
I think going from a culture where it was considered that one needed to know the answers and sort of put forward that we knew where we're going through to actually, it's the power of questions, that it's all around actually being curious.
How can we do things differently? How can we do things better? How can if we tried this over here? And so, that shift through leadership mindset and through the culture of the organization into how going from knowing what the answer is or being expected to know what the answer is, which in today's world, it's very hard to know what the answer is with everything that's going on through to actually the power of a leader is in asking great questions and in building a psychologically safe environment where actually, from across the team, you can have the discussions, you can challenge each other, you can have diverse thinking and that will get you to a better place.
Certainly, over this culture change journey that I saw there, I saw that power of shifting the culture of being more curious, of creating that sort of environment really come into fruition.
Corson
I think, maybe helpful just for the audience to understand some of the themes you talk about in the book, this idea of the seven C's of curiosity and how that impacts high-performing teams. Maybe you could share what those seven C's are and why they're so important in building curiosity as a part of the muscle memory of the organization?
Brown
In our research, we sort of got into is curiosity, something that you're innately born with that as a trait you have, or is it a skill? The research shows there's a bit of both in there that people are born curious. I think it shows up when we're about four or five years old, we're at our most curious. And if anyone has young children, they'll recognize that “why” curiosity of young kids. And then often, it goes down from that point.
But it's also a skill and our model of the seven C's is really designed as a framework to help build that skill. And, through the research, we found different traits, different ways you could approach it that would actually help you to be more curious. So, those seven, the first is around context understanding the context of what it is that you're curious about.
Second is around community, that actually being curious is best not done alone, that actually you learn from others. So, you find these different roles of who can help you on the journey of curiosity, who can unlock knowledge for you, who can share their wisdom with you, etc.?
That creates lots of information, so you then need to curate that down. So, what are the things that really apply to what you're most curious about? Then applying, creativity. So, what are the questions I can ask? What are the things I can think about of how we do this differently? Maybe how people haven't done that before. And asking questions is great, but we need to put that into action, which is our next exercise is construction. So, how do we experiment? How do we try things out in the real world? Those experiments give us results. So, then we need to apply criticality.
So next C, so critical lenses ,biases, confirmation bias, know what's going on here, be really critical around what we're seeing. And then finally, that builds confidence, whether your experiments, when you go through that process, whether successful or not, still builds up our confidence. So that sequence of context through community, curation, creativity, construction, criticality, and then through to confidence gives us a structure for how we can be more curious.
Corson
Well, that's really helpful. Hopefully, you know, many people are relieved to hear that there's an element of nurture as well as nature in this. So, even if you're not necessarily naturally gifted, there is some structure and some process you can follow here that will help to build that curious muscle memory.
You talked about the C’s building. Is it a linear path or do people come with strength in certain of those areas and have you seen that play out?
Brown
Yeah, it can be either. So, you can focus on one of those that we can look at community or we can look at criticality, and certainly individual and the organizations we find are better at certain ones. You find some organizations who are fantastic at creativity, loads of ideas, but poor at construction or actually putting those ideas into practice or poor at criticality of actually assessing which are the ones you want to kill and which ones you carry forward.
So, you see different strengths in different organizations, but it does work as a flow as well. You can sort of use it as a structure and it becomes a sort of virtuous circle as well because as you go through and you build confidence at the end, you can then go sort of back through with older experiments, asking bigger questions, and you end up in this sort of virtuous circle of curiosity. So, it has the flexibility to be take one in isolation, focus on it, or use it as a structure to be more curious.
Corson
There is a flywheel effect that you can build that momentum. That's really helpful. And we'll get in and talk a little bit more about what it means specifically for finance leaders. But with your purview, you'd have obviously looked at this across enterprises and across functional pillars within the organization. How do you see different functions adopting this and are there differences based on the functional stereotypes of how people embrace this?
Brown
I think it's right that there are some functional differences as well. And if I go back to my previous world, we had looking at manufacturing, for example. And so, embracing curiosity in manufacturing is possible, but you need to do it in the right way that someone who's mixing up a new batch of medicine, you don't want them to be curious about what happens if I put a bit more of this in and a bit of that and see what happens.
It needs to be done in a structured way. Whereas other areas, actually, it's much easier to run experiments and things. So, there are differences across functions, there's differences of how naturally maybe it comes to some functions, but there's value in curiosity, I think, right the way across the enterprise.
And some of the research is also if we look at organizations where the CEO and the leadership team is more curious, some research done by INSEAD [Institut Européen d'Administration des Affaires] was in mapping that through to actually a long-term success of the business, that more curious leadership team actually tied through to that longer-term success over time.
Corson
That's very helpful. And obviously, that sea of context is really important. And that's something that, I think, we've talked about a fair bit on the podcast, particularly for finance leaders in the context of innovation. And obviously, now what you're describing in terms of the farmer industries is similar, the regulatory, there are areas where failure and quality are non-negotiable. So, you don't want to be experimenting in those areas. But where are the areas we’re actually within some clearly defined guardrails, you can experiment.
So, that brings me back to the sea of creativity and not one that finance is always associated with. As you think about what are some of the things in terms of the tangible things that you could help to start to bring some of that creativity to the way teams come together and behave, are there some examples you can share of the kind of activities that even perhaps where it's not the natural default setting for the function of the individuals, you can start to bring in some of those areas of creativity?
Brown
If we look at creativity as an element in there around asking questions and asking sort of great questions and one of the most powerful questions being “what if”? What if we did this differently? What if we looked at a different way around how we could do this? With many aspects within finance, there are certain processes that are repeating and repetitive. And with all the advances we see with AI [Artificial Intelligence], for example, at the moment, where can we be asking questions and what if there was a way we could leave AI to help us on certain pieces here? And seen examples across organizations of things like accounts matching between payments going out and invoices coming in and AI matching these up, etc., and saving huge amounts of time within the finance function on how things are done.
So, going through and being curious around what if there was a better way of doing it? What if there was a way we could leverage some of these new technologies that are out there? I think that's super powerful. And then also looking to the future and what if some of the things that we hold to be true are not true in the future that we work on generally a sort of linear approach of things go up 5% from one year to the next, or costs go down 5% from one year to the next, or whatever and everything else stays the same.
But actually, if we look at the outside world at the moment, whether it's geopolitical tensions, whether it's the impact of AI, etc., what if actually things are a bit different in the future? In a finance function, I think part of the remit is to say, actually, what if some of these things were different? How would we then be coping for that from a finance perspective? I think the power of questions, that creativity piece of asking “what if” is more powerful today than probably it's ever been or more needed today than it's ever been before.
Corson
I think you gave some great examples there, Simon, and I'm interested to ram that point home. I'm sure there are some skeptics out there in the finance community say “I'm a finance person, why do I need to be worried about curiosity?” If you were to really define why curiosity is so important in the context of finance leadership, how would you summarize it?
Brown
I think it's shifting from a “we know all of the answers, nothing will change, this is how it will always be” into actually being curious of “what's going on behind the numbers and what's going on in the outside world and what could change, what would need to be different for us not to continue on the linear path that we've always seen it”? And we've seen many organizations who have rested on their laurels and assumed everything would be the same, nothing would change around them, but actually then suddenly things did change and those organizations aren't here anymore.
I think one of the responsibilities, the CFO [Chief Financial Officer] or financial leadership team is to ask some of those questions actually of what if these things we've held to be true are different? Let's be curious around what would that look like? How would we model that? How would we react to that? Do we need some provisions around these things? Do we need some experiments here around certain pieces? I think a curious CFO can ask some of those things.
Corson
I think, we're all experiencing disruption, transformation in so many dimensions of our personal and professional lives that, if anything, it’s more important than ever, right now to be asking the why questions. So, you obviously deal with this day to day in your role and at an enterprise level. And, you know, I think about this a lot in terms of how do you influence individuals? How do you influence the function? How do you influence the enterprise? Because part of your responsibility is doing this at scale for an organization like ours. There’s different levels, right? How do we think about it personally? How do we think about it within the functions we operate in at the enterprise level? And what are some of the tangible things at those levels we should be thinking about doing to kind of drive systematic curiosity, if that makes sense?
Brown
Culture is a big element of that. So, there's things we can do at an individual level with training solutions, etc. But actually, a lot of that, if the culture isn't there to support it, it makes it very hard work. So, one of the things we're looking at the moment is around leadership expectations for EY [Ernst & Young, LLP] and what are the expectations of our leaders in the future to make sure that we are creating that culture that actually then encourages that curiosity? We talk around the better the question, the better the answer, the better the world works, and encouraging that curiosity across the organization. And it comes, key part of it is from that leader role modeling, the power of leaders demonstrating behaviors that we expect is huge. So, leaders who can ask questions, who are comfortable with saying, “actually, I don't know the answer to this. Let's try an experiment. Let's go and figure that out” is a core part of that change.
And that means then leadership development to be able to help create that mindset and the confidence in our leaders. And then as we look at all the different learning solutions that we have, making sure there's a consistency and alignment there, and then taking that broader into some of the other HR [Human Resources] processes, how do we make sure everything aligns around performance management, around reward, around promotions, that all of that is actually encouraging the same set of behaviors and is all pointing in the same direction.
And that's super hard to try and align all of that, particularly in an organization of 400,000 people, but that's what we're working on, to create that consistency of experience and get the power of actually having everyone pulling in the same direction with the same set of leadership expectations and behaviors.
Corson
You gave a great example there of the importance of role modeling some of those behaviors as leaders. Any other examples you can share that way — you've seen individuals do that really well because, again, the audience is finance leaders. What are the practical things they can be doing to really exhibit this to their teams?
Brown
The power of the leader is huge in this. And we did some research in the past around this, and we looked at the multiple traits across a team and we looked at how they considered the leader of the team and whether that was favorable or unfavorable around that leader. And what we saw was if they felt the leader was favorable, there's about a three-point increase in these different dimensions of the team.
If they felt the leader was unfavorable, it’s about an 18-point drop on average. And the biggest drop was in the curiosity in the team. There's a 22-point difference between a favorable leader and an unfavorable leader in the curiosity of the team. The power of the leader to either create a team that can be curious, that can ask questions, that can experiment, that can fail because a key part of experimenting is pushing boundaries. And if you're pushing boundaries enough, many of those won't fail. But what can we learn from that and what can we share and can we openly talk about it?
So, the leader can create that safety or the leader can destroy that. So, if listening in, it's sort of within the team, are you encouraging people to speak up? Are you encouraging different viewpoints? Are you getting people to be a devil's advocate? Are you saying, what could go wrong on this? Where could I be wrong on this? Those types of pieces of both showing the personal vulnerability and then creating the safety within the team that different ideas can come up and people can test things out and experiment.
Corson
I appreciate you bringing some data to the conversation as well. That's some really helpful examples. So, this has been great. Really appreciate you showing some of these insights. As we wrap up, and your advice and recommendations to an audience of finance leaders. What would you be encouraging them to think about and do coming out of this conversation if they're interested in preparing their team to be adaptable and agile in responding to all this transformation that we're experiencing?
Brown
Look into some of one's own behaviors of are you creating that safety within the team to be curious, encouraging people to be curious, encouraging people to learn within there as well and sharing one's own learning? There's so much at the moment, particularly a lot of my own learning is around AI at the moment, which is moving so fast. Are people learning? Are people sharing that learning? Are you creating that safety in the team? And then questions, thinking around what are great questions, what might be different in the future?
What are we taking that will always be the same that maybe won't be here? What could we do differently? What if we automated this? What if we applied this thinking over here? The power of those questions, I think, is very easy to bring in as a leader as well. So those would be a couple of practical things.
Corson
I suppose just one final question. Do you have data that supports that curiosity ties directly into innovation and more innovative cultures?
Brown
There was research that Spencer Harrison from INSEAD did around the link between curiosity and innovation. And he found curiosity ties through to creativity, which ties through to innovation, was able to get the correlation there. And there's multiple other research points around the value in terms of better decisions, in terms of increased teamwork, improved communication. You can check out The Curious Advantage book. We've got a lot of those details in there that shows that the research of the power that curiosity can actually provide.
Corson
The book is a great resource. Obviously, that structure of the seven C’s you talked about is really helpful in providing some structure to the way of thinking about it. And, I think, so many finance leaders are thinking about how do we kind of innovate, how do we adapt for change? And I think this kind of approach around curiosity is, is so powerful. So, I really appreciate you coming on and sharing some of that with us.
Brown
Thanks for having me.
Corson
As we wrap up some, we always like to conclude with a few rapid-fire questions just to get to know you a bit more. So, is there a particular quote that's an all-time favorite of yours and why is that?
Brown
I like carpe diem, seize the moment, which I first saw in the great film, Dead Poets Society. But I think it's a really powerful one, just a reminder that we should be making the most of every single moment.
Corson
Love it, seize the day. One of my former bosses used that consistently and it's a great reminder. So, I appreciate that one personally. Is there a particular piece of advice that you were given during your career that has been the most impactful?
Brown
I remember early in my consulting career, I sat down with my career counselor and said, can you give me one piece of advice? And he thought for a moment, he said, “Don't take it too seriously.” I think that was quite helpful advice. Further on in my leadership journey, a similar question of what's the worst that could happen? And actually, when you go through, what's the worst that could happen? Actually, it's probably not so bad. So, it's a good way to just contextualize things and sort of reframe what you may be thinking.
Corson
I'm reading Thinking in Bets at the moment and sort of the idea of time shifting and yeah, actually what in the moment feels like it's the end of the world. If you kind of blow yourself out a little bit and look at it in terms of longer time frames, actually you sort of realize contextually it's not quite as bad as it may feel in the moment. So, I'm going to be certainly applying that as a tool.
And then finally, Simon, we're all busy, we have so many things coming at us. How do you personally try and maintain some wellbeing and balance?
Brown
I'm a keen cyclist. I have the privilege of living in Switzerland where there's incredible hills around. We were down in the Alps at the weekend doing a couple of the Alpine passes. So, that's a fantastic way to feel very unfit as I'm slogging up a mountain pass, but see some beautiful scenery, get some fresh air, completely switch off from everything. So, that's one element. Try and work out a couple of times a week in the mornings before work, and then just listen to my body when it's telling me I'm too tired. I just stop, pick it up the next day, try and build in some gaps through the day to be able to think about things. Those are some of the things that work for me.
Corson
Well, yeah, I mean, being out in nature and some of those Alpine passes and the views, that's a great way of, again, refreshing and re-energizing. So, appreciate you showing that. Great to have had you on and again, love the book, love the podcasts.
Brown
Thanks for having me, Myles.
Corson
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