There is a reflex most of us have that we rarely examine: the urge to judge. Someone gets promoted ahead of us and we think, “That’s unfair.” A company we admire makes a baffling decision and we say, “That’s stupid.” A colleague approaches a problem differently from us and we conclude they are wrong.
Judgment feels productive. It feels like discernment. Most of the time it is neither. It is a way of closing a door that curiosity would have walked through.
The Case for Curiosity
My friend Jeffrey Pfeffer, the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, put this sharply in a recent talk he gave at Stanford titled If You Want to Change the World, You Need Power. Jeff argued that people should replace judgment with curiosity, and that we need to become more clinical and less judgmental about the world around us.
This is not a new theme for him. Jeff laid out the same argument years earlier in a Fortune piece in January 2015, “The Single Best Goal You Can Set for 2015,” where he proposed becoming less judgmental as the single most useful resolution someone could make for the year. He drew there on Buddhist philosophy and on Carol Dweck’s research on growth and fixed mindsets to argue that judgment, especially of other people, undermines happiness, professional effectiveness, and our own ability to learn. The Stanford talk extends that thinking with newer examples and a sharper structural turn.
His example from the talk stayed with me. Why do airlines succeed despite providing terrible customer service and chronic delays? If you just judge, “airlines are awful,” you have learned nothing. If you get curious, you arrive at a structural insight: weakened antitrust enforcement means airlines do not have to compete on service because customers have few alternatives. That is a real understanding, and you can only reach it by replacing your judgment with a question.
Jeff extended the point to careers. When someone you consider less capable is succeeding more than you are, the judgmental response (“this is unfair, this is horrible”) gets you nowhere. The curious response, what are they doing that I am not, might actually teach you something useful.
As Jeff put it, judgment is the source of much of our unhappiness. I think he is right, though I would refine it. Judgment itself is not the problem. We all need good judgment. The problem is premature judgment, the kind that shuts down inquiry before it begins.
This connects to something Jeff and I have talked about for years. He acknowledged me in his book Leadership BS, in part because I once described the genre of management writing he was reacting against as “feel-good leadership literature.” That phrase captured what he wanted to push back against: a body of advice that confirms what readers already want to believe rather than asking them to look harder at what is actually true. The same instinct that produces feel-good literature produces premature judgment. Both let you stop thinking sooner than you should.
Curiosity as a Professional Practice
Over the years I have come to treat curiosity as an operating principle, not just advice. In my career leading technology organizations at Knight Ridder, Condé Nast, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and News Corp, some of my best decisions started with resisting an initial judgment and staying curious longer.
When a team’s approach did not match what I would have done, my first instinct was often to redirect them. When I caught myself and asked “why did you choose this path?” instead, I frequently learned something I had not considered. Sometimes their approach was better than mine. When it was not, understanding their reasoning helped me explain an alternative more effectively than overruling them would have.
This matters in technology leadership because the field changes faster than any one person’s mental model. Dismissing a new tool or method because it does not fit your prior assumptions guarantees you will miss things that matter. Evaluating it on its merits requires asking what it is for before deciding whether it is good.
Inherited Decisions
A specific version of this comes up almost every time I take on a new CTO and/or CPO role. I arrive somewhere new, look at the technology choices, the product roadmap, the team structure, and the processes already in place, and find decisions I would have made differently. The judgmental response sits right there waiting: my predecessor was wrong, I am here to fix things.
I have learned to refuse that response. Part of it is that badmouthing a predecessor is classless, and I would not want it done to me after I leave. The more important part is that I do not actually know what my predecessor knew. On the technology side, I do not know what platform constraints they were working around or what reliability incidents shaped a particular cautious choice. On the product side, I do not know which customer segments were behind features that now look puzzling to me, which experiments produced the data they were responding to, or which strategic bet from the CEO or board forced the roadmap into the shape it took. Some decisions are downstream of contracts, regulatory exposure, or talent realities that are not visible from where I am sitting on day one. The decision that looks wrong from the outside often makes sense once I understand the conditions it was made under. My default assumption is that my predecessor made the best decision they could with the information they had, and I do the work to test that assumption before I draw any other conclusion.
That work is not a formality. I read the artifacts that survive: planning documents, post-mortems, customer research, board decks. I talk to the people who were in the room. I look at what shipped and what was killed. By the time I am ready to change direction, I usually understand the prior decision better than the public version of it suggested, and that understanding shapes a better next decision.
When I do decide to change direction on something significant, whether it is a system architecture, an infrastructure investment, a product roadmap, a pricing or packaging model, a design system, or a process, I present the change as a solution that makes sense going forward. I do not present it as a repudiation of what came before. The team I am leading worked under that prior decision, sometimes for years. The engineers built it. The product managers fought for it. The designers refined it. They do not need to be told that the work they did was wrong. They need to be shown where we are going and why, and they need to see that I respect the work that got the company to this point.
Curiosity and Judgment Are Not Opposites
“Be curious, not judgmental” can become a platitude that excuses indecisiveness or a lack of standards. That is not what I mean, and I do not think it is what Jeff means either.
Curiosity is what you do before you form a judgment. It is the investigation phase. The problem most of us have is not that we judge; it is that we judge too quickly, on too little information, filtered through too many assumptions.
A good leader, or a good thinker of any kind, extends the curiosity phase. They ask more questions before reaching conclusions. They treat their initial reactions as hypotheses to be tested, not verdicts to be defended.
Habits That Help Me Stay Curious
A few habits help me when my instinct is to judge.
The first is to replace “that is wrong” with “why does this exist?” If something looks irrational but persists, there is usually a structural reason for it. Finding that reason is more useful than complaining about the irrationality. The airline example is one version of this; most organizational dysfunction is another.
The second is to separate the person from the pattern. When someone frustrates me, I try to shift from “what is wrong with this person” to “what system or incentive is producing this behavior?” People usually act rationally inside their own context. The fastest way to find out what that context is, in my experience, is to ask the person directly, respectfully and constructively. A question like “help me understand how you are thinking about this” produces more useful information than any amount of inference from the outside. Another favorite of mine, especially once a conversation has started, is the simple “tell me more.” Three short words that signal I am genuinely interested in their viewpoint and want to learn from them, and they almost always produce something I would not have heard otherwise. The tone matters. If the question sounds like a challenge, you will get defensive answers or silence. If it sounds like genuine inquiry, you will usually get a real answer, and sometimes a constraint or a piece of context that changes my view entirely. Understanding that context gives me something I can work with. Judgment does not.
The third is to treat my own certainty as a signal to slow down. The more confident I feel early in a process, the more I have learned to pause. Strong early certainty usually means I am running on pattern matching rather than on fresh analysis.
Why This Matters Now
We are living through a moment that rewards loud opinions and fast judgments. Social media is built for hot takes. Political discourse runs on certainty. Professional life increasingly favors people who project confidence whether they have earned it or not.
Curiosity is a quieter posture. It does not always look impressive in the moment. It compounds, though. The people I have admired most in my career, the ones who built things that lasted and earned trust across organizations, were almost uniformly more curious than they were judgmental.
My motto is: Victory is winning people over, not defeating others. Winning people over starts by being curious about them. You cannot do it once you have already judged.
Jeffrey Pfeffer’s talk, “If You Want to Change the World, You Need Power,” is on the Stanford Graduate School of Business Insights page. His book Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time takes the same instinct further, arguing that evidence should replace feel-good myths in how we talk about leadership.