Everybody Says Curiosity Is the Skill. Nobody Tells You How to Deliver It.

The first time I ever got chewed out at work, it was because I was asking questions.

I was a mid-level designer working for an extremely siloed organization. I saw a connection between two teams building related things, so I reached out to learn more about a project that wasn’t mine and to offer some shared insights.

My manager pulled me aside and lectured me afterward.

“You are under my department, not theirs. Why are you talking with them? This feels like you’re trying to switch departments.”

She was typically pretty nice, but that was the angriest I’d ever seen her. So I took the lesson and shrank back, the way you do when you’re still figuring out how organizations work.

Questions are a liability. Whatever’s going on in the other silo, somebody else is paid to wonder about it.

That was ten years ago. Since then I’ve interviewed 32 top design leaders about how design has changed in 2026, and one word keeps coming up.

“You either have it or you don’t, and I think that’s the suckiest part of this, but it’s true… If the curiosity is not there, then the question is, maybe design is not the right discipline for you.” — Head of Design, SaaS

Curiosity is the answer. Curiosity is what survives AI. Curiosity is how you grow as a designer even in this messed-up job market.

Fine. I believe it. But I was curious in that hallway, and it cost me, so “be curious” was never the advice I needed. The advice I needed was about delivery, like most designers.

What I eventually figured out is that I’d made four separate mistakes that afternoon, and none of them had anything to do with my curiosity.

Plenty of leaders told me the fear is self-inflicted.

“Up until the point where someone tells you that you’re not allowed to do that — screw it. Just do it. What’s the worst thing that can happen? I’ve yet to get to the point where somebody is like, ‘you totally wasted my time.’ From a very junior role to a very executive role, I’ve never had that experience… People are much more willing to help you get to the end result you’re trying to drive than folks anticipate.” — Head of Design, SaaS

He also put his finger on where the silence starts, and this one I recognized immediately:

“Designers discount their business acumen and understanding of data points, not because they are bad at it, but at some point someone told them that it’s not their job.” — Head of Design, SaaS

Someone told me it wasn’t my job. I believed her for about four years.

And I’ll be honest: just do it is the advice I would have hated at 28.

Easy to say as a Design Head where the organization loves design. Or as an extrovert who appears to build relationships in their sleep.

A Head of Strategy and Design at Europe’s largest retailer named the barrier closer to how I actually experienced it:

“The thing that can stop them is that it feels intimidating. You might have to ask a bunch of different teams for permissions, you need to get trained in different things.” — Head of Strategy and Design, retail

Both camps are describing the same wall from opposite sides. The people telling you to just ask are probably got over it years ago, in increments too small to notice at the time.

By now it doesn’t feel like a wall they cleared. It feels like something they’ve always been able to do.

The wall is real, especially if you’re junior, or shy, or new. It’s also thinner than it looks, if you know how to knock.

Some rooms are political enough that nothing you do will save you, and there are managers who will read any question as a threat no matter how carefully you frame it. I’ve been on the wrong end of that.

What follows improves your odds, but it won’t make you bulletproof, and getting shut down after doing everything right usually says more about the company than about you.

So here are the 4 parts to tear down that wall, which I didn’t do.

I told the other team why I was reaching out. It didn’t occur to me to tell my own manager.

From where she sat, a designer on her team started spending time on another department’s project, unprompted, for no stated reason. She had a gap where my motive should have been, and she filled it with the worst available option: he’s trying to switch departments.

That’s what a missing because does. It doesn’t leave a neutral blank. Somebody fills it in for you.

A Director of UX who built a design team from scratch teaches a script for exactly this:

“My favorite expression is, ‘help me understand,’ or ‘I want to learn. Will you teach me? Will you show me? I don’t understand X, can you help me?’ Be curious, ask questions, and do so with genuine curiosity and respect.” — Director of UX

And the sentence that does the real work: I’m not trying to waste your time with random questions. I just want to understand because it helps me design a better solution.

It’s a small clause, and it changes what the question is. “Why are you in my numbers?” becomes “you’re trying to do your job better,” without you having to say either of those things out loud.

There’s a sequencing version of this too:

“It always starts with the why question… ‘Can you help me understand why we’re doing that? What’s the value behind it? What’s driving it?’ So trying to understand their thinking is the first thing. And then you can question it.” — VP of Design, startups

Understand first, question second. I had the order backward, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to notice.

I could tell you exactly what the two teams were building and where I thought the overlap was. I could not have told you a single thing about what my manager was measured on, her worries this quarter, or her relationship with the other department contact.

If I’d spent twenty minutes on that, I think I’d have seen the “switching departments” read coming. In a siloed company, a manager’s currency is her people. Someone on her team volunteering hours to another department isn’t curiosity to her. It’s leakage.

The leaders who don’t step on these landmines treat stakeholders the way we treat users.

“I literally go to people’s LinkedIns, and I try to understand who my project team is. I try to understand what their motives are. You literally do like a UX kind of research on all of them, especially the main stakeholders. What are their motivators? What’s important to them?” — Design Consultant

Another director, at a completely different company, described almost the identical habit:

“This is just people and conversations. And the same way that we would try to get to know an audience is what I like to do with stakeholders — I build out a persona in my head of, here’s the five people I have to present to. Knowing what drives this person, knowing what motivates this person, knowing what this person’s pain points are.” — Director of UX, enterprise

One UX research consultant turns it into a project you can actually run: build personas of your business stakeholders, then go tell them you’re doing it. You’re one of my users.

A question from someone who hasn’t thought about you at all is just an interruption in your day, whereas the identical question from someone who’s clearly spent a little time on what you care about comes across as help.

You didn’t change the question. You changed what showed up with it.

I actually did bring something here, which is what makes this one sting. I offered the other team shared insights. I wasn’t just mining them for information.

But look at how it was distributed. The other team got insights, and my manager got a report that one of her designers was off doing unauthorized work with a department she didn’t control. She carried all the risk for value that went elsewhere entirely.

Compare that to how one Head of Design described plugging in:

“This is where, even as a junior designer, this is exactly where I would plug in and be like, okay, what happens because of this? Here are these three points that came from understanding the discoverability perspective from the user research and the conversation we had about the project history.” — Head of Design, SaaS

That’s not a question. It’s a trade — and the trade is with the person whose permission he needs.

The same consultant framed it as a trust sequence: the professionals who succeed approach stakeholders proactively, with information that helps them make their own decisions.

You bring them in. You show them you want to help.

A research consultant also raised something I hadn’t considered. A lot of the defensiveness you’re running into may have nothing to do with you:

“People are afraid of layoffs… People want to keep their information and their data close to them. So that might be where this is coming from, where they get the resistance, because people are protective of their space.” — UX Research Consultant

The person guarding the dashboard might not think you’re annoying at all. They might think you’re a threat to their job, which is a completely different problem and a much easier one to solve.

Give them something before you ask for anything, and most of it goes away.

I’d add the version I learned the hard way: give it to your own side too.

Cold outreach to another department, in a company where departments didn’t talk. And I’d never once floated a half-formed idea with my own manager and watched how she reacted.

Neither of us had any read on the other, and there was nobody in either department who could have said oh, he does this, it’s fine.

“Once you hone that in in low, low stakes meetings, you start building the confidence to do that in bigger, higher stakes meetings… I would start with one-on-ones. Sit with your product manager and be like, ‘I understand your request, but this is what I want,’ and articulate why that’s not sitting well with you.” — Design Leader

And then the part I think matters most:

“That sort of starts building relationships that helps you create your allies internally, and then they start speaking about you in rooms where you’re not there.” — Design Leader

Rooms where you’re not there: that’s what I was missing. When my manager heard about the outreach, she learned about it through a system, not from someone who knew me.

Another leader was more concrete about the venue: recognize that the person across from you isn’t just Jasmine or Bob, it’s the head of brand, it’s the head of product. Then go get coffee with them.

And a design leader who runs her own team found the same pattern playing out. The designers who became genuinely data-fluent didn’t get there by being braver in meetings:

“It’s having an ally and having a genuine curiosity that has been the thing that has always unlocked designers to really become data savvy… finding that data analyst or the data scientist or whoever it is on your team, and just saying, ‘I’m really curious about what you do. I really want to learn more.’” — Design Leader

Curiosity in a meeting is high stakes. Curiosity in one-on-one is coffee chats.

At my last job, I needed to talk to people I had no right to talk to.

Small HealthTech company, building for hospital administrators. I wanted a real user research channel, but our users were second-order contacts — friends of our executives, long-term customers on contracts running from $50,000 to well past $250,000 — and every one of them was reachable only through an introduction from our VP.

Structurally, that’s the hallway again. Something I needed, sitting on the other side of someone else’s relationships. The difference is that this time I went through him instead of around him.

• I made the because about them. Not “I want to do user research.” Instead: let’s find out what frustrates customers most, so we can go fix the biggest of it.

• I dropped the jargon. “User research” sounds like an academic exercise with his best accounts. “Understanding where people run into problems” doesn’t.

• I did his work for him. I wrote the intro emails and sent them to the VP as copy-and-paste text, so his job was to forward, not compose.

• I kept the ask small. Fifteen minutes at the end of calls already on the calendar, instead of a meeting anyone had to create.

• I sent value back. Every interview turned into something shareable — summary reports, visualizations, artifacts that made sense to people who weren’t in the room.

That last one mattered most, and not for the reason I expected. Those deliverables went places I didn’t. They got forwarded into conversations I wasn’t part of — which is the exact thing my mid-level self never had.

That’s how a new UX research channel got built at the organization.

I opened with a leader who says it’s an impulse you either have or you don’t.

Maybe he’s right about the impulse. Maybe some people are just wired to want to know how the thing works, and you can’t install that in someone who doesn’t have it.

But the impulse isn’t the part that gets rewarded. What gets rewarded is the delivery: the reason attached to the question, the homework on the person, the finding you brought with you, the relationship you built in a room where nothing was at stake.

Those are all communication skills, and communication skills are teachable. So the one thing he called untransferable turns out to be sitting right next to four things that aren’t.

That’s the difference between the curious mid-level designer who gets chewed out and the curious senior designer who gets invited back. It isn’t the curiosity.

I had it in that hallway. I just hadn’t learned to translate it yet.

The poll is anonymous, and I’m asking for a real reason: I’m building the next version of a communication cohort around whichever one wins.

Mine was the second, and it took me about a decade to admit it.

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