Curiosity is the Skill That Saves Your Career with Fenton Jagdeo Jr.

Curiosity can feel like a personality trait, but we treat it as something much more practical: a career strategy and an organizational advantage. Host Bill Banham sits down with futurist, entrepreneur, investor, and strategy professor Fenton Jagdeo to break down what “radical curiosity” looks like when you turn it into a repeatable discipline, especially for HR leaders, people managers, and anyone navigating uncertainty at work. Fenton shares his Curiosity Compass, a four-direction framework designed to help teams get unstuck and generate real innovation. We talk about navigating norms by challenging inherited assumptions, exploring beyond your industry to find analogies and fresh ideas, solving systematically by breaking complex problems into smaller parts, and widening the lens so decisions account for stakeholders and second-order consequences. If you lead talent, culture, or transformation work, these moves translate directly into better problem solving and more resilient strategy. We also dig into the hard part: making curiosity safe and credible inside organizations built on KPIs and performance metrics. Fenton offers concrete changes to performance management, job descriptions, competency models, and promotion criteria so learning agility and experimentation actually get rewarded. We explore lateral growth, internal talent marketplaces for cross-functional projects, and why “smart failure” can be a feature of a healthy culture, not a bug. Finally, we tackle a modern career risk: when specialization becomes identity, disruption can feel existential, especially as AI and automation reshape roles. This conversation offers a grounded approach to building depth plus breadth so you keep your credibility while gaining optionality. Subscribe, share this with a leader who wants more innovation, and leave a review with your biggest curiosity challenge right now. Connect with Fenton: linkedin.com/in/fentonjagdeo Support the show Feature Your Brand on the HRchat Podcast The HRchat show has had 100,000s of downloads and is frequently listed as one of the most popular global podcasts for HR pros, Talent execs and leaders. It is ranked in the top ten in the world based on traffic, social media followers, domain authority & freshness. The podcast is also ranked as the Best Canadian HR Podcast by FeedSpot and one of the top 10% most popular shows by Listen Score. Want to share the story of how your business is helping to shape the world of work? We offer sponsored episodes, audio adverts, email campaigns, and a host of other options. Check out packages here. Follow us on LinkedIn Subscribe to our newsletter Check out our in-person events