Curiosity: a competitive advantage for today’s CFO

As AI reshapes the decision-making process, Vicky Wall explains why curiosity could become the most valuable business asset for chief financial officers

Our world is becoming increasingly non-linear, accelerated, volatile and interconnected.

For finance leaders navigating this complex environment, curiosity rather than certainty could prove the most powerful tool in their armoury.

Research conducted by Institut Européen d’Administration Des Affaires (INSEAD) has uncovered a clear link between the long term success of businesses and high levels of curiosity among their CEOs and leadership teams.

This should not come as a surprise. A curious mindset can help chief financial officers (CFOs) and other leaders address uncertainty and respond to emerging challenges. It is no longer acceptable to keep doing things a certain way simply because “this is how they have always been done”.

Instead of trying to provide answers and follow established operating processes to the letter, today’s finance leaders must ask the right questions and explore the possibilities presented by artificial intelligence (AI) and automation.

Perhaps most importantly, they must build a psychologically safe environment in which team members feel comfortable asking questions freely, offering opinions and questioning old ways of doing things.

By doing so, they will encourage the diverse thinking that will get the finance function and the organisation to a better place.

The seven Cs of curiosity

The question is how to develop this curious mindset and engender it in finance teams. A structured framework, such as the “Seven Cs of Curiosity”, explained in The Curious Advantage, offers a useful approach for developing and strengthening a curious mindset within organisations.

This framework acknowledges that we are all innately curious to one extent or another and in different ways. It recognises that curiosity is also a skill that can be developed and offers a means to do so:

• Context: Understand the context of what it is that you are curious about.
• Community: Being curious is best not done alone. You learn from others, so find people who can share their knowledge and wisdom with you.
• Curation: Once knowledge and information are gathered, they must be curated to identify the most important aspects worth exploring.
• Creativity: What are the questions to ask? Think about how things can be done differently.
• Construction: Gathering information and asking questions is useful but of little value if not translated into action. How do we use the answers to inform experimentation? How do we use the results to construct things to try out in the real world?
• Criticality: A critical lens needs to be applied, both to the results of the experiments and to exploration, to ensure value is delivered in real world conditions. This will also ensure that learnings from failed experiments inform future endeavours, improving outcomes.
• Confidence: Going through this process will help build the confidence required to apply the new thinking developed as a result of asking the right questions.

This Seven Cs of Curiosity framework has the flexibility to take individual elements in isolation, focus on each individually, or serve as a structure for encouraging curious.

Some organisations and individuals can be very good at some elements but not at others. The framework can be used to identify and address strengths and weaknesses.

It can also be used as a structure that, when followed, creates a cycle that fuels further curiosity. Having gone through the framework and built confidence, organisations can go back and use it again to ask other, bigger questions.

Bringing creativity to the core

While creativity is not always associated with finance leaders, it is possibly the most important of the “Seven Cs” for CFOs.

An essential component of creativity is asking great questions. One of the most powerful is: “What if we looked at a different way of doing this?”

Many processes within finance are repetitive and mundane. Advances in AI—in particular, agentic AI—mean CFOs should be asking: What if there were a way AI could help us do certain things?

A curious CFO can use AI to ask questions like:

• What if things don’t go up or down the way we assume?
• What if things don’t remain the same?
• What else might change?
• How will this affect our bottom line and the overall performance of the organisation?
• Do we need to model these things?
• Do we need to make some provisions around these things?
• What should we do to react and respond to changed circumstances?
• Do we need to run some experiments using an internal AI model to see how those responses might play out?

Building a culture that withstands uncertainty

When we look at current geopolitical tensions and market turbulence around the world, the ability to ask these questions, and elicit realistic answers, has never been more important.

It can significantly reduce the risk of an organisation falling victim to unforeseen circumstances, and enhance the CFO’s capacity to answer questions from internal stakeholders within tight timeframes.

Organisations can sometimes grow complacent, assuming their operating environment will remain unchanged. When circumstances shift, however, they are unprepared to adapt.

Avoiding this eventuality is about more than just having a curious CFO. It is about individuals across the enterprise adopting a curious mindset—and this comes down to culture.

While training can help individuals develop a curious mindset and become better at different aspects of the “Seven Cs” framework, it is very hard work without the right culture.

To create a team that is genuinely curious—one that asks questions, experiments and accepts that failure is part of pushing boundaries—finance leaders must encourage people to speak up.

Leaders must also cultivate an environment in which constructive dissent is encouraged and established norms and traditional ways of working can be appropriately challenged.

In this context, the need to create a psychologically safe environment—in which failing and failing fast when exploring new possibilities is not only acceptable but desirable—cannot be emphasised strongly enough.

CFOs must also ensure people are learning and sharing what they learn. This is where the new thinking that will drive innovation and help finance teams evolve beyond traditional ways of working will come from. And it all begins with curiosity.

Vicky Wall is Partner and Head of Financial Accounting Advisory Services at EY Ireland