Our mission
to catalyze a culture of radical curiosity that empowers people, communities, and businesses to navigate and flourish within the global redesign of the social systems that comprise public life.
Our theory of change:
01. THE CHALLENGE:
OUR SOCIAL SYSTEMS ARE FAILING
IN FRONT OF OUR EYES
Healthcare. Education. Food. Housing. The shared code of how we live, our fundamental concept of public life, is in question. Today we’re living in the middle of a profound, paradigmatic shift that requires a new approach to problem-solving. Yesterday’s breakthroughs have become today’s epic challenges. We need to move beyond what we know, shed our assumptions about our most basic human needs, and systematically re-examine the institutions, systems, and markets that are the bedrock of public life.
02. THE OPPORTUNITY:
IMAGINING NEW WORLDS
IS A RADICAL ACT
Asking questions is a practice. A way of seeing. But, when it comes to this practice, we are out of practice. Struggling to see clearly, purposefully. Data rich, but meaning poor. When we stop asking questions, we surrender one of the most fundamental attributes of what it means to be human, our imagination. Without a flourishing imagination, we squander our abilities and undermine our potential. Curiosity is expressed by asking “why”, then acted upon by our imagination when we ask, “what if?”. This combination of inquiry and invention is a human right. A right we aren’t spending wisely or affording to everyone. And over time, it has cost us dearly, as individuals, and as a society.
03. THE METHOD:
QUESTIONING COMMONLY HELD BELIEFS
TO IMAGINE BETTER FUTURES
As the world has become more complex, no single solution framework suffices. Today’s challenges require profound interdisciplinarity, diversity, blending and the remixing of knowledge into responsive cocktails fit for the occasion. The types of problems we face, can no longer be satisfied with templatized answers, they demand the original thinking that begins with asking essential questions. The sets of blueprints of the past need to be thrown out. They, themselves, are artifacts of the fractured thinking that has contributed to the very problems we seek to confront. We need a revival of thinking as an earlier upstream, foundational intervention into the mental models that we now know are a part of the problem.
What is needed now, more than ever, is a complete revival of deep thinking. A new practice for collective questioning and imagining that serves all of us.
Radical Curiosity is the practice of questioning commonly held beliefs to imagine better futures.
To be radically curious is to be engaged with questions about what it means to be human today. To question our commonly held beliefs, those assumptions about our collective wisdom often left unchallenged. Wisdom, like any technology, needs an operating system upgrade. What if we learned to revisit the periodic table elements of the human condition – those essential building blocks of knowledge such as trust, ethics, happiness, gender, racism, power, economics, and our relationship to the natural world? If the power of questioning can lead to space rockets and electric cars, can we also nurture what this indispensable thinking process can mean for the human experience? This, at its core, is what it means to be Radically Curious.
As Epic Decade Studio, led by Seth Goldenberg, we’ve spent the past decade developing and practicing Radical Curiosity as a method, mindset and lifestyle of inquiry. Next year, Seth will publish the book Radical Curiosity with Penguin Random House. In the next decade, Radical Curiosity is central to our mission of catalyzing a culture that empowers people, communities, and businesses to navigate and flourish within the global redesign of the social systems that comprise public life.