My dad was basically a walking “how might we” statement.
If you’ve spent time in design thinking, you know those the questions that crack open possibility instead of shutting it down. But my dad didn’t learn them in a workshop. He just lived that way.
“Could I use this old teletype machine as a printer?” “Could I print an etching by rolling my Volkswagen van over it?”
Lucky me. I grew up thinking that if you could puzzle over something long enough, you might be able to figure it out.
Curiosity was the foundational skill that made that possible.
I’ve been writing about the 85/15 framework — the idea that AI will handle roughly 85% of the predictable, pattern-based work, while the 15% that remains is irreducibly human.
Curiosity isn’t a personality trait. It’s a skill, and it can be learned. It’s asking “what if” before jumping to “here’s how.” It’s wondering what is possible.
Without curiosity, every other skill on this list is lifeless. With it, they are alive.
Curiosity is not the same as being interested. Interest is passive. Curiosity is active, it pulls you toward the unknown instead of away from it. And, growing from that root? Five branches.
First, reframing, the ability to look at a problem and see a solution underneath it. A client says “our onboarding takes too long.” A reframer asks “what if speed isn’t the issue?” Reframing is not just “thinking outside the box.” It’s recognizing what you thought was a constraint was a solution.
Second, making the implicit explicit. Every team runs on assumptions nobody’s ever said out loud. What “quality” means. What “done” means. The skill here is surfacing those invisible agreements. It’s the ability to hear what’s not being said and bring it into the conversation.
Most (none?) of the interesting problems don’t come with clear instructions. The skill isn’t eliminating ambiguity. It’s being able to move forward, make decisions, and stay creative when you can’t see the whole picture. Operating in ambiguity means holding multiple possibilities open while still making progress. It’s deliberate, not reckless.
Fourth is collaboration. Not “working together” in the calendar-invite sense, real collaboration is where the output couldn’t have come from any one person alone. Where the thinking that emerges between people is qualitatively different from what any individual would have produced. This is not consensus-building or compromise. It’s the willingness to let your idea be changed by someone else’s.
Finally, empathy, the ability to imagine that your point of view is not the only point of view possible. You don’t have to feel what someone else feels. You have to be willing to consider that they see things differently. This is not “being nice.” It’s a cognitive discipline.
All of these grow from the same root, the willingness to wonder before you know.
My dad never called it a framework. He just kept asking “what if I tried…?”