Success is driven by a combination of insight, common sense and hard work, not luck, knowing the right people, or having a rich father, although the last two can be a good start.

It is also a given that successful people are usually pretty smart, although pretty smart people are not always successful.

Looking at medium sized businesses  as I do day in and day out, I see a range of all of the above, and find that above all else, the characteristic that distinguishes the successful from the rest is curiosity.

Curiosity about the world around them, the workings of their own business  and those of their competitors and allies, about the drivers of change and behaviour.

Broken down further, Curiosity comes from a number of sources, and I tend to score those I work with, generally very informally, on a range of parameters, which gives me an insight to their ‘curiosity quotient’.

They do not guess.  Rather than be happy to guess, they tend to experiment find ways to form and test hypotheses about the causes of the things around them. They do not just jump to a conclusion, they employ what I learnt at school was called the ‘scientific method’, often unconsciously.  Jumping to a conclusion that offers an easy explanation delivers a seductive but almost always wrong answer, particularly when done without deep domain knowledge.

They engage with problems physically.  This probably sounds a bit mad,  but those who are curious need to see and feel a problem, engage with it physically in some way. Leading a large marketing team in a highly seasonal market, one of the ways I seemed to be able to predict those who would be successful marketers was that they were happy to get out in the peak season and pack shelves in supermarkets, talk to those supermarket employees who managed the shelves, talk to customers as they shopped, and tap into the wisdom of the part time merchandisers we had while they drove from store to store. They engaged physically with the competitive environment in which customers  and the myriad of things, often the unconscious choices that led the purchase of one of our products Vs an alternative. Somehow they could ‘smell’ the issues.

They welcome the thought that they do not know. By embracing their ignorance they are able to engage with alternatives, see things with fresh eyes, and make new hypotheses about the drivers of behaviour.

They look beyond the obvious.  The obvious explanation of some happening are often not the best, or even accurate explanation of the behaviour.

They make their own judgements. Right or wrong good people form a judgement, and are prepared and able to defend it, while taking into consideration any new or revised information that is provided, and absorb that into the views and change as necessary. They are flexible people, not tied to a set of preconceptions, while at the same time being decisive. Procrastination is not a part of the DNA.

They never assume that the past will be repeated. They consider the past to be a indicator of what might happen, not the driver, so they dig into the guts of a process, behaviour drivers, and science, to come up with the fundamentals that drive everything else. The psychology of behaviour has not changed much over the millennia, our understanding of the fundamentals has increased daily. Those with curiosity seek to sweep away the assumptions based on simple extrapolation.

They make themselves experts. Rather than relying on so called experts from elsewhere, they ensure they at least know enough to subject those so called experts to challenging and informed questions in conversations to test their expertise.

They remain focused on the issues, and are relentless in pursuit of information that informs.

They make decisions based on data rather than emotions. They seek the facts that underlie the data. Our lives are so immersed in so called data, stuff spewed out of computers that takes on a credibility of its own simply because it has been digitised, that it has acted to erode our own judgement of facts. Digital garbage is still garbage. The really curious seek the truths in the facts, not hyperbolic leaps of faith proposed by dodgy data.