To break the pattern of rigid higher education leadership we must move away from compliance and towards curiosity

In our last piece, we argued that compassion is a strategic ethic and a way of shaping systems, relationships, and institutional life so that colleagues and students can think, feel, work and learn sustainably.

Curiosity is compassion’s natural companion. If compassion creates the conditions in which transformation becomes possible, curiosity is the practice that activates those conditions. Together, they help us move beyond technical fixes towards cultural shifts that endure.

In the current higher education landscape, shaped by growing regulatory scrutiny and sustained financial pressure alongside students’ expectations, curiosity becomes more than a leadership posture. It becomes a strategic capability for navigating complexity without constricting the learning cultures universities exist to protect.

In higher education, we routinely ask students to question assumptions, iterate, and stretch their thinking in public. Yet when we lead change, we often find ourselves drifting in the opposite direction. Our leadership cultures tend to reward decisiveness, closure, and control. Under these pressures, curiosity can feel risky, inefficient, or even disloyal. This tension forces a harder question: if inquiry is at the heart of learning, why does it feel so difficult to practise in leadership?

Trees and woods

We know that when things intensify, the instinct to get everything right, keep everything together, and move at speed can quietly take over. Shame does its quiet work, telling us that we should already know, that we must have answers, that pausing to ask may expose us. In those moments, it’s as if the space to think freely narrows and we start to brace rather than explore.

Curiosity does something different. It invites us to pause long enough to ask what we might be missing, whose voices are absent, what assumptions are making our choices feel narrow or inevitable. This is curiosity as a disciplined relational practice of noticing the edges of our own understanding. It resists reduction and opens space, making the system bigger again.

Because curiosity introduces ambiguity, friction, and vulnerability, it needs to be held within compassion. Compassion insists that harm is acknowledged and addressed and does not allow us to stop at comfort instead of engaging with the possibility of change. Compassion gives us the capacity to stay with the discomfort of not knowing long enough for genuine learning to emerge. Without compassion, curiosity can feel like exposure rather than exploration. Leadership needs both.

Across the sector, we encounter moments that quietly reveal the closing down of curiosity. These are not abstract dynamics; they show up in the everyday rituals and decisions that shape institutional life. Patterns in admissions are shaped as much by caution as by aspiration. Approaches to assessment become steadier and more fixed, even as our students’ experiences diversify. Conversations about workload often start and end with numbers, rather than with the culture that makes exhaustion feel inevitable. Research ambitions stretch further, sometimes in ways that leave little room for meaning or connection. And our digital choices are frequently led by what feels efficient in the moment, rather than by the questions we might want technology to help us ask.

These patterns are not incidental. They reflect the broader sector dynamics shaped by TEF metrics, OfS compliance, the rising cost of living for students and the growing reliance on digital tools that can unintentionally narrow pedagogic and governance possibilities.

These are systemic signals as opposed to isolated issues. In each of these spaces, curiosity offers a different way of being with the work: a way of asking how we got here, what assumptions we are carrying, and what other futures might be possible if we widened the frame.

These moments call us to remember that leadership is a relational act as well as a role to enact. Curiosity helps us shift from reacting to context to understanding it, from repeating inherited patterns to uncovering new forms of collective sense‑making.

Curiosity as cultural practice

Curiosity is a cultural practice that shapes how we see, relate, and decide. It is also a form of movement and energy that keeps systems from contracting under pressure. It expands what feels possible, allowing ideas, people and perspectives to circulate rather than contract. When curiosity moves through a system, it brings lightness, oxygen, and momentum. It is a way of entering rooms, conversations, and dilemmas with a stance of openness and lightness, that comes when judgement softens and other possibilities become thinkable.

Curiosity asks us to believe that new ideas are already present in the system, waiting for space and safety to emerge. It invites a shared confidence that the answers are not held by any one person, they live within us, together. It calls for a collective sense of ownership and resourcefulness, where insight is co-created rather than performed by individuals. This kind of curiosity honours ambiguity and acknowledges that change begins with attention and the willingness to notice the dynamics that shape us and the humility to ask different questions about them.

When curiosity becomes a cultural practice rather than an individual disposition, it reshapes how organisations learn. It is an animating force of a learning organisation, turning personal insight into shared understanding and transforming dilemmas into opportunities for growth.

In universities, this is not merely organisational theory; our institutions are, at their core, learning communities. When curiosity becomes cultural, it reconnects leadership with the intellectual values that define academic life.

In adult learning terms, it guides us through a rhythm that is more cyclical than linear: a disorienting moment that unsettles our assumptions; the feelings we would often prefer to avoid; a reflective period where meaning is examined; small experiments with new roles or behaviours; and eventually, integration into our sense of who we are and how we lead.

Curiosity keeps this cycle alive. It nudges us to name the dilemma rather than bypass it, to acknowledge the emotional layer rather than override it, to examine our assumptions rather than defend them, and to experiment with small shifts rather than retreat to the familiar. And crucially, it reminds us that transformation is not solitary work. Learning happens in connection, through being witnessed, supported, and held accountable by others.

This is what distinguishes a learning organisation from one that merely processes information: the willingness to be changed by what we see, together. Yet even the most curious cultures can diminish when governance structures unintentionally close down space for inquiry.

Holding curiosity through governance

Curiosity is fragile in systems that have been built on compliance. In university governance, where academic judgement, regulatory compliance, student expectations and financial scrutiny intersect, curiosity is often the first casualty. In many governance spaces, fundamental questions are quietly discouraged and the desire and need for certainty, speed, and alignment can make dissent feel impolite, naive, or obstructive. Well-crafted papers sail through, while silence is interpreted as agreement. This is where curiosity and compassion must work together; compassion provides the safety for dissent to surface and curiosity gives dissent purpose and direction. Over time, curiosity becomes something practised privately and not collectively or structurally.

For curiosity to survive, governance must hold it, through:

• Naming assumptions rather than hiding them
• Welcoming dissent as data rather than treating it as inconvenience
• Protecting reflective pauses in spaces that are otherwise driven by performance
• Recognising that blind spots are not failures but invitations

Critically, it means accounting for how decisions shape relationships as well as outcomes and attending to power, including who asks questions, whose questions land, and whose voices are missing. When governance builds a container for curiosity, leaders can move from managing risk to cultivating learning.

Curiosity asks leaders to practise a different kind of courage: to pause, listen, reflect, and inquire. Across the HE sector, this courage is required of leaders working in very different realities; programme leads redesigning assessments under shifting regulatory expectations; Heads of School balancing financial constraint with academic values; PVCs navigating scrutiny while trying to protect space for inquiry; and professional services colleagues whose decisions quietly shape how learning and governance actually work.

Curiosity becomes a way for those occupying these roles to stay with complexity long enough for new insight to surface. It asks leaders to create conditions where uncertainty is safe enough to explore and where insight is a shared asset rather than a personal performance. It calls us to protect the edge or the pause as a space where new ideas can emerge before being shut down by habit or fear. It asks us to remain attentive to the dynamics that restrict imagination and to act on the structural barriers that keep options narrow. It invites us to make our learning visible so that curiosity becomes part of our cultural infrastructure rather than an individual disposition.

Curiosity without compassion can destabilise. Compassion without curiosity can stagnate. Leadership requires the interplay of both. If compassion provides the conditions and curiosity the movement, leaders still need ways of practising this in the everyday reality of governance, decision‑making and organisational life. Curiosity becomes cultural only when it is enacted.

Practising curiosity in leadership and governance

Curiosity becomes cultural when leaders create the conditions in which inquiry becomes a shared, safe, and expected part of how the organisation thinks. These practices offer ways for leaders to hold curiosity as an everyday discipline.

1. Protect the pause: Create deliberate moments in meetings, governance, and decision‑making where speed eases and reflection becomes possible. Curiosity needs space to breathe and rarely emerges under urgency.

2. Name assumptions as part of the work: Gently surface the taken‑for‑granted beliefs that quietly shape decisions. Make it normal to articulate what you think you know, what might be missing, and where your understanding feels partial.

3. Invite perspectives that widen the frame: Bring in voices, data, and interpretations that disrupt narrowing. Curiosity grows when leaders intentionally seek out what is currently unsaid or unseen.

4. Treat dissent as data: Treat hesitation or disagreement as valuable information about power, fear, culture, or risk. Curiosity asks: What is this trying to tell us?

5. Make learning visible: Share what you have noticed, what surprised you, what you changed your mind about, or what you plan to explore next. Visible learning signals that curiosity is part of leadership, not a threat to it.

These practices are about starting in a different space, entering rooms, dilemmas, and relationships with movement rather than constriction or depletion. This is where the practice of curiosity becomes cultural rather than individual.

One of the simplest ways this culture becomes visible is through the questions leaders choose to ask. Curiosity becomes cultural when it shows up in the micro‑moments of leadership, governance, and team life and often through the questions that shape how we pay attention. Questions can widen a system or narrow it; they can invite movement or reinforce certainty.

Here are examples of questions that keep a system open, relational, and capable of learning.

• What might we be missing if we move too quickly here?
• Whose perspectives are not yet shaping our understanding, and what might change if they were?
• What assumptions are making this path feel narrower than it needs to be?
• What is the hesitation or tension in the room telling us?
• If we treated this moment as an opportunity for learning rather than performance, what would we pay attention to?

These kinds of questions are invitations and gentle openings that widen the room and create the conditions in which collective intelligence can move, gather, and surface.

Transformation rarely begins with a grand plan. It often starts with a moment of noticing: a hesitation in a meeting, a question that doesn’t land, a sense that the conversation is narrower than the situation requires. It grows when we choose inquiry over assumption, connection over isolation, and learning over performance. If our sector is to navigate this moment of profound change, curiosity must become part of how we do leadership as well as how we support learning.

At a time when universities are being asked to justify their value, defend their autonomy and reimagine their futures, visible curiosity in leadership becomes a way of modelling the very cultures we seek to champion. It needs to be held, protected, and made visible in governance, decision making, and the mundane rituals that shape culture.

We ask our students to learn out loud. This is an opportunity for our leadership and governance to do the same.

All views expressed in this blog are entirely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views or positions of any affiliated organisations or institutions.