Curiosity separates a company still running on last decade's assumptions from one built for growth and change

About a year and a half ago, my husband Ken and I sat down to write out our company's culture. Not create it. Write it down. We had been operating on the same values for years: talent, passion and personality in who we hired; speed, accuracy and excellence in what we do; and communication, initiative and ownership in how we do it. None of that was new. What was new was putting it into words everyone could actually read.

While writing it, I kept asking myself an uncomfortable question: If this is genuinely how we operate, why has it taken us this long to say so out loud? I realized the values hadn't actually been shared by everyone. Some people lived those values without ever needing to say them out loud. Others didn't, and as long as nothing was written down, that wasn't always obvious. Vague expectations are comfortable that way. Nobody fails a standard that was never stated.

Once we put it on paper and started actually holding people to it, that comfort went away. Clarifying what we believed came with a side effect. We found out who didn't believe it. Over the months that followed, we lost some people. As we began to talk about those core values in job interviews, we gained people who embodied them fully. We still aren't perfect, but we are building a team of people who don't accept that "it is what it is." They ask why.

Writing down our culture taught me something else. We fixed problems we disagreed about because we gave attention to them, but the biggest obstacles were the things we hadn't questioned in years.

"We've always done it that way" isn't the answer

Snow and ice management runs on experience, and experience is valuable. But experience has a side effect: The longer something works, even moderately well, the less likely anyone is to ask whether it should still work that way.

"Because we've always done it that way" isn't dishonest. It's usually true. It's just not a good answer. For a company to grow, people need to stop, look around and ask why it was always done that way. Of course, every process in a company was designed by someone at some point for reasons that made sense at the time. However, times change, crews change, customers change and technology changes. The reasons don't always keep up.

Years ago, trying to remember everything that needed to happen before the season started, I felt like someone trying to remember 100 things at once, and that started to worry me. So I created an annual project in our CRM called Season Prep and Cleanup, with a pipeline that automatically created tasks for every stage of the season: preseason, before the first storm, after the first storm and after the season ended.

There were so many tasks that were repeated every year that relying on memory wasn't realistic. For example, preseason tasks like updating contact lists, onboarding seasonal employees, checking for unsigned contracts and editing the customer information in QuickBooks when a property changes hands. None of those had much to do with the act of snow removal, but they were all necessary, and none of them had been written down.

Every one of those tasks depended on someone remembering it at exactly the right time for as long as they held the role. We had relied on memory because that was the way we had always done it. But with company growth, changing roles and different people stepping into those roles over time, I knew something would eventually get missed – not because anyone was careless but because memory was never a system to begin with.

So, I asked the question that had been unasked for years: What happens if we stop trusting memory and start trusting a system instead?

Curiosity as a business asset, not a personality trait

There's a line in the TV show "Ted Lasso" that I want to put on a yellow sign and hang slightly askew on a wall at our office "Be curious, not judgmental." It's four words, but they pack quite a punch. Judgment assumes you already know the answer. Curiosity assumes you might not but are willing to find out.


Companies willing to let someone ask, "Why do we do it this way?" in a meeting without it sounding like an accusation tend to get more from their people, not less. It has to be modeled by the people at the top, or it dies the first time someone asks why and gets a defensive answer instead of a real or thoughtful one.

The takeaway

Curiosity separates a company still running on last decade's assumptions from one built for growth and change. A culture nobody had written down. A checklist nobody questioned. A pricing rule nobody remembers the origin of. Every one of those is a question waiting to be asked, and every day that it goes unasked, it gets a little more expensive to fix.

As you head into another season, ask yourself: Does this work because it's actually the best way, or because nobody has asked about it in a while?

Nicole Boegeman is executive vice president of Swinter Group and SG Advantage. Contact her at nicoleb@swintergroup.com.