Business Brief is a (very brief) new solo series hosted by Looking Outside podcast host, strategist and corporate futurist Jo Lepore.

The path to the c-suite is predictable and still reliant on strong commercial literacy. But while marketers are relegated to perceptions of creativity, not financial savviness, senior leaders lack the very skills they bring – curiosity. In this Business Brief, Jo reflects on the cross-functional and transdisciplinary skills needed to bring truly future-forward thinking to organizations caught up in short term thinking.

The final episode of Season 3 takes us to the precipice of change, looking at the topic of Fear. We discuss this with Mark Minukas, co-author of Unfear, a book on the very topic.

Through intervention, and self-reflection, Mark illustrates how we can use fear and fear-driven reactions to our benefit, to better understand what we’re trying to ‘react’ to and what threatens our self-identity. The game is to be curious, Mark says, and use fear as a cue for learning more about yourself.

To broaden our perspective, in Episode 11 we bring the Curiosity mountain to us direct from the source, with the original Chief Curiosity Officer, former VP of Consumer & Market Insights and Foresight at L'Oréal Groupe, and now Chief Data Officer at Pierre Fabre, Sarah DaVanzo.

Sarah shares her vast experience in “strategic curiosity science”; unpacking what curiosity is beyond intellectualism, stressing the worrying results in quantifying and tracking curiosity over time, and highlighting the importance of immersion when applying curious behavior.