When Curiosity Becomes a Career Risk
I've watched the same pattern wreck teams across multiple companies: Smart people asking sharp questions get ground down first.
Some have the privilege to leave. Others burn out quietly while keeping the lights on for everyone else. But the systems punish them all the same. For thinking.
This isn't accidental. It's structural.
Late-stage capitalism has trained us to value compliance over curiosity, activity over insight, and busyness over actual results. We've built organizations that reward people for looking productive while penalizing them for thinking clearly about whether any of it even makes sense.
At one tech company, I challenged quarterly business reviews as a team's primary success metric (& commission lever). My take? QBRs are mostly performative, seldom groundbreaking, & not the best use of everyone's time.
When I pushed for metrics that tracked relationship quality and deal sustainability—what actually drives revenue—leadership labeled me "difficult."
Translation: I wasn't performing the compliance ritual correctly.
At another company, I was one of three people on a 30-person team to hit quota by focusing on long-term strategic deals & account threading instead of activity metrics in accounts without whitespace. Leadership asked me to present company-wide to explain my results, then they penalized me for being honest. My approach was praised as that of a "true sales architect" by one sales leader, then my own told me I shouldn't have shared that. (I wish I was joking, too.)
The message was clear: We want your results, but only if you achieve them by our formula.
This is how organizations slowly suffocate their own intelligence, and it's how they exhaust those who could help them think more clearly.
The Neurodivergent Advantage
[Among a laundry list of other things], something I've learned as someone whose brain works differently: Neurodivergent people are often the first to spot systemic dysfunction because we experience it most acutely. We notice when processes don't make sense, when stated values contradict actual behavior, when efficiency "theater" replaces actual efficiency.
Some would say that this makes us "scary" to systems built on consensus and compliance.
At one company, I kept asking why our customer success metrics focused on activity volume instead of customer outcomes. Turns out, measuring actual success would have revealed that our product roadmap was solving the wrong problems. Better to track calls completed than face that uncomfortable truth.
I pushed anyway. Redesigned our success metrics around customer retention and expansion revenue. Customer satisfaction improved dramatically, but leadership was furious; the new metrics exposed how many other departments were optimizing for vanity instead of value.
I thought to myself, Do most of these organizations actually have "performance problems," or do they have "truth problems"?
People don't want to hear what's actually happening if it means admitting they've been measuring the wrong things for two or three years.
The Economics of Curiosity Suppression
Systems that punish curiosity aren't broken. They're working exactly as designed.
Curious employees ask expensive questions. They want to know why we're spending $50K on marketing campaigns that don't convert. They wonder why our sales team promises features we can't deliver. They notice when our "efficiency improvements" actually slow everything down.
Answering those questions requires admitting mistakes, changing direction, and occasionally starting over. That's threatening to leaders who built their credibility on being right the first time.
It's cheaper—in the short term—to label curious people as "not team players" and replace them with people who won't ask uncomfortable questions.
But here's what that approach actually costs:
That startup I worked with that was hemorrhaging $50K quarterly on growth initiatives. The team doing the work knew it wasn't working. But the system had trained them that raising concerns was career suicide.
The firm losing six-figure contracts during their integration? Frontline employees could see the customer confusion coming months before it hit revenue. Even flagging it in their systems. But leadership was too busy simultaneously firefighting and celebrating "synergies" to listen to operational intelligence.
In both cases, curiosity suppression didn't just cost money, but also the ability to course-correct before small problems became existential crises.
What Actually Works (When You Stop Pretending)
When I redesigned that commission structure that was pitting sales against product, I wasn't just fixing a compensation problem. I was rebuilding the incentive structure to reward collective intelligence instead of individual heroics.
I stopped trying to change people and started changing the systems that shaped their behavior.
Most leaders approach curiosity like it's a personality trait they can inspire into existence. They run engagement surveys and workshops while leaving the structural barriers intact. It's like asking people to swim upstream while refusing to acknowledge the current.
Real curiosity infrastructure looks different.
Decision-making transparency that shows people their input actually influences outcomes, not just gets "taken into consideration" (aka filed and forgotten)
Compensation structures that align teams instead of creating internal competition for scarce resources
Problem-escalation processes where identifying issues is rewarded, not punished with extra work or accusations of negativity
Leadership that removes systemic barriers instead of asking people to work around them
Questions That Reveal the Reality
Want to diagnose whether your organization actually supports strategic thinking? Ask these questions and watch what happens:
"What problems do we keep having that we're not allowed to solve?"
Every organization has sacred cows: processes, relationships, or strategies that are exempt from scrutiny. Those untouchable areas are usually where your biggest vulnerabilities hide.
"Where do our systems reward the wrong behaviors?"
If sales gets bonuses for deals that customer success can't deliver, you're paying people to create problems. If managers get promoted for hitting short-term metrics that damage long-term capacity, you're incentivizing organizational harm.
"Who has permission to say 'this isn't working' and actually be heard?"
If it's only senior leadership, you're operating with 10% of your organizational intelligence. Maybe less. The people doing the work see problems months before they show up in dashboards.
"What happens when someone identifies a real problem?"
Do they get thanked and ignored? Tasked with solving it on top of their existing workload?Blamed for "negativity"? The response pattern tells you everything about whether curiosity is actually safe.
Beyond Performance
The companies that retain people who think strategically don't do it with better benefits or wellness programs. They rebuild how they actually operate to reward intelligence over compliance.
This isn't about creating "psychological safety" so people feel comfortable sharing feelings. It's about building economic safety so people can afford to think strategically without risking their careers.
People who think strategically aren't burning out because they can't handle the work. They're burning out because they can't handle working in systems that punish them for thinking.
Some have the economic freedom to walk away. Others stay and slowly lose pieces of themselves. But until you address the structural reality that crushes curiosity, you'll keep isolating the very people who could help you build better.
