Does curiosity really kill the cat?

I once had a staff member who questioned everything. Every new initiative, every policy change, every improvement process. She would find the hole I hadn’t seen. At first, it drove me crazy.

I’d think, “Why can’t we just implement this? Why does she always have to poke at it?” Then I figured it out: She was saving me from rolling out half-baked ideas.

Before launching anything new, I started running it by her first. Not because she was negative. She wasn’t. But because she would ask the questions I wasn’t asking: “What happens when...?” “Did we think about...?” “Who’s this going to be hard for?” “What problem are we actually solving?”

She caught things before they became problems. She found gaps before they became failures. She questioned assumptions that everyone else — including me — just accepted.

The thing is: Most organizations say they value curiosity. Then they reward people who execute without pushing back.

But in 2026, with AI executing faster than ever, we need the people who slow down and ask: Should we even be doing this?

AI is brilliant at optimization. It can’t ask if we’re optimizing the wrong thing.

That staff member? She’s exactly who organizations need more of now. The ones who question whether we should fill that role, whether that metric matters, whether we’re solving the actual problem.

Curiosity doesn’t kill the cat. It saves you from building the wrong thing.

The people who ask uncomfortable questions aren’t slowing you down. They’re keeping you from going fast in the wrong direction.

In a world where AI gives us answers instantly, the valuable skill is asking better questions.