Curiosity Killed the Cat

I grew up watching Tom and Jerry. I suspect quite a few of us did, although I can't claim that watching a cartoon cat repeatedly fail to catch a mouse contributed much to my formal education. It was entertaining, though, and there was something reassuring about the fact that, no matter how elaborate Tom's plans became, Jerry usually came out on top.

Tom wanted to catch Jerry. Fair enough. It's hardly an unreasonable ambition for a cat, although Tom did seem to take it to extremes. He'd devise some fiendishly complicated scheme involving traps, pulleys, springs and explosives, set the whole thing in motion and then discover that the only creature in any danger was himself. Jerry would stroll off with the cheese while Tom ended up flattened under an anvil, blown through a wall or reduced to a smoking heap on the floor. You could almost admire the ingenuity, if it weren't for the fact that the intended victim was usually the only one who escaped unscathed.

And then Tom would do it all again.

Thinking about it now, I'm not sure exactly what Tom's real problem was. He was certainly interested in Jerry, although not quite in the way the saying intended. He wanted to know where Jerry was and how he might finally get his paws on him. But it wasn't his curiosity that usually landed him in trouble. It was what he did about it.

Tom would spot an opportunity, devise some elaborate scheme and launch himself into action with very little consideration of what might happen next. He'd pull a lever, light a fuse or put some complicated contraption into operation, apparently oblivious to the possibility that a device involving several metres of rope, a loaded cannon and a precariously balanced piano might have one or two unforeseen consequences. Jerry would escape, Tom would suffer some spectacular indignity and we'd all have a good laugh.

The really remarkable thing wasn't that Tom kept getting things wrong. We all do that. It was his apparent inability to learn from the experience. Whatever happened in the previous episode, the next one found him starting afresh with another plan, as though gravity, Jerry's cunning and his own capacity for spectacular failure had ceased to exist. He never seemed to ask himself why the last idea had gone wrong, let alone whether the next one was likely to end any differently.

There was a lesson in those cartoons after all. Curiosity can be useful, but it helps to think about what you're doing with it. And when things go wrong, there's not much point repeating the same mistake with a bigger hammer. For Tom, at least, that can be fatal.

"Curiosity killed the cat"

The saying itself goes back at least to the nineteenth century, although its precise origins are uncertain. There's also a second part of the saying that tends to be forgotten (or wasn't known in the first place): “but satisfaction brought it back”. I think that changes the message substantially. Curiosity might get you into trouble, but it can also help you understand something you didn't know before. The trick is to learn from what you discover. Unfortunately for Tom, he rarely seemed to get that far.

Most of my working life has been spent dealing with data, statistics, analysis and research methods. Curiosity has obviously been an important part of that, although I doubt I'd have described it in those terms when I started out. But I've always been interested in how things work, what the numbers tell us and whether the conclusions people draw from them stand up to scrutiny. In that respect, I've probably spent more time than is healthy trying to work out what's going on behind the scenes.

Take statistics. It's perfectly possible to calculate an average (mean, median , mode - take your pick) without having much idea what it tells you. A spreadsheet will happily produce one, regardless of whether it's useful, misleading or completely inappropriate for the purpose. The calculation can be correct while the interpretation is nonsense. Getting the right answer to the wrong question isn't an especially impressive achievement. The cynic in me would suggest that this happens more than we'd care to admit.

It's a bit like Tom constructing an elaborate machine to catch Jerry without considering whether the machine will actually do what he wants. The ingenuity of the contraption doesn't make it a good idea. Nor does the fact that it works exactly as Tom designed it, if the result is that he ends up flattened under a piano.

The same applies to more sophisticated analytical techniques. A regression model can produce coefficients and statistical tests, but those results don't automatically explain what's happening in the real world. The data needs to be understood, as well as the assumptions behind the method and the circumstances in which the analysis was undertaken. Otherwise, you risk mistaking a technically competent piece of work for a useful one.

This is one of the reasons I enjoy training. There's a lot of satisfaction in seeing somebody move beyond following a set of instructions and begin to understand what they're doing. Whether we're talking about statistics, research methods, Power Query or another analytical technique, learning which "buttons to press" is useful. Knowing when to press them, and when not to, is more valuable.

And the same principle applies when you move beyond individual techniques to the way an organisation operates. I've spent enough time working with data and information systems to know that the problem isn't always the technology, the quality of the analysis or even the people doing the work. Often the problem is the assumption that we already understand what's happening, when we've only seen a small part of the picture.

That's where consultancy comes in. A consultant needs to bring a fresh perspective, drawing on experience while remaining curious enough to discover what makes a particular organisation different. There's little point arriving with a solution before you've understood the problem. Tom had plenty of solutions. What he needed was somebody to stop him building another contraption long enough to work out why the previous one had failed.

Management consultants can produce impressive reports, colourful presentations and recommendations with enough acronyms to keep a conference room occupied for an afternoon. But the value of consultancy depends on understanding the organisation and the people who work in it. The official process described in a procedure manual may bear only a passing resemblance to what happens on a wet Tuesday morning when three people are off sick and the computer system has decided to take early retirement.

This is why, when I undertake consultancy work, I start by listening. I want to understand what people are trying to achieve, what problems they're encountering and, crucially, what question they actually need answering. I'll often map out the data flows to see where information comes from, how it moves through the organisation, what happens to it along the way and where things might be going wrong. The process can reveal that the apparent problem isn't quite the problem people thought they had, or that the information needed to answer their question already exists but isn't being used in the right way.

It's tempting to jump straight to a solution, particularly when somebody has already decided that a new system, a dashboard or another piece of software is what's needed. But that's a bit like Tom building another elaborate contraption before working out why the last one failed. The design might be faulty. Jerry might have spotted it coming. The whole idea might have been flawed from the start. Whatever the explanation, making the next trap bigger and more expensive doesn't necessarily help. A little time spent understanding the problem at the outset can save a great deal of effort, expense and frustration later. And it gives us a much better chance of solving the right problem, rather than producing an impressive answer to the wrong question.

I've also encountered enough workarounds over the years to be wary of any organisation that claims everything happens exactly as documented. People adapt. They find ways around obstacles, sometimes for very good reasons and sometimes because nobody has revisited a process since the last millennium. Understanding the difference is essential if you're going to recommend changes that have any chance of working.

Leadership presents similar challenges. Seniority can give people experience, authority and a wider perspective, but it doesn't confer universal knowledge. Organisations can become very good at reinforcing what their leaders already believe, particularly when nobody wants to be the person who points out that the emperor's new strategy might need a little more work.

Tom was always convinced that his latest plan would work. You could practically see the confidence on his face as he put the finishing touches to some elaborate contraption. We knew what was coming. Jerry probably knew, too. Yet Tom pressed on regardless.

In a cartoon, that makes for good entertainment. In a business, repeatedly pursuing a failed strategy without understanding why it failed can be considerably more expensive. Curiosity helps leaders remain open to new information, including information they'd rather not hear. It can also help them recognise when experience has become an excuse for doing things the way they've always been done.

The same applies to customers, competitors and business opportunities. It's easy to assume that we know what people want because we've been doing something for years, or because a few particularly vocal customers have told us. But markets change, circumstances change and what worked brilliantly last year may not work quite so well next year.

That doesn't mean abandoning every established practice in pursuit of something new. Sometimes the old way is still the best way. The point is to understand why it works, recognise when circumstances have changed and avoid repeating a failed approach simply because it's familiar. Tom could certainly have benefited from keeping a record of his previous attempts, although I'm not sure Jerry would have given him much time to consult it.

Curiosity matters in our personal lives, too. We can become remarkably fixed in our views about other people, often on the basis of limited information. We decide that somebody is difficult, unreasonable or simply not our sort of person, and then interpret everything they do through that lens. Sometimes there's a perfectly good explanation for behaviour that initially seems baffling. Sometimes there isn't, of course, but we don't always know enough to tell the difference.

Tom and Jerry were locked into a relationship in which each expected the worst of the other. Jerry generally had good reason to be wary, given Tom's intentions, but the pattern was self perpetuating. Tom chased Jerry because he wanted to catch him, and Jerry outwitted Tom because he was being chased. It's a cartoon, so we can forgive the absence of a meaningful conversation about their relationship. In real life, though, assumptions about other people can keep us repeating the same arguments and misunderstandings for years.

We can be equally inflexible about ourselves. I've met loads of people who have convinced themselves that they're no good at maths, for example, when what they really mean is that they had a bad experience of being taught it. A single failure, an unkind remark or a label acquired years ago can become an accepted truth about what we're capable of doing. I remember one of my early maths teachers reflecting on my aptitude by stating that I would probably be good at putting up shelves when I grew up. Fortunately I didn't let that deter me, and am also rubbish at DIY.

But for some those beliefs, or judgments from others, can become self fulfilling. If we assume that we can't learn something, we may never give ourselves the opportunity to find out whether that's true. But the opposite can be just as unhelpful: persisting with an approach that clearly isn't working and blaming everything except the approach itself. There's a difference between determination and refusing to learn.

Even though I have spent more than thirty years now training people in statistics, analysis and research methods, I still find there's more to learn. My training and consultancy business is built around helping people develop the knowledge and skills to make better use of data, but the techniques themselves are only part of the story. Understanding what we're doing, recognising the limitations of what we know and being prepared to change our minds are just as important.

And, of course, that applies to me as much as anybody else. Experience is useful, but it can also encourage complacency. It's tempting to rely on methods that have worked before without noticing that the circumstances have changed. The challenge is to keep learning, rather than assuming that because we've managed something successfully in the past, we must already know everything we need to know about it.

Tom's problem was never that he was curious about Jerry. It was that he kept trying to catch him without learning from his previous failures. Each new plan was another attempt to achieve the same result, despite all the evidence that his approach wasn't working. Of course, if he'd learned from his mistakes, we'd have had a much shorter and less entertaining cartoon series.

We don't have to make the same mistake though. Curiosity can help us question our assumptions, understand other people and discover better ways of doing things. But we also need to think about the consequences of our actions and be prepared to change course when experience tells us we're getting it wrong.

And that brings us back to where we started. “Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.” Tom's curiosity kept getting him into trouble because he never seemed to learn from the results. The satisfaction comes not simply from asking questions or pursuing answers, but from understanding what we've discovered and putting that knowledge to good use. Curiosity alone may kill the cat, but it's the satisfaction of finding out, learning and understanding that brings it back.