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Diana Kander

In a world where disruption is constant and failure are feared, she challenges leaders to flip the script: get curious, stay humble, and fall in love with learning. This isn’t just advice it’s a blueprint for reinvention.

Most leaders are asking the wrong questions. Diana Kander argues that curiosity is a leader’s most underused asset. But in too many organizations, curiosity is stifled by ego, routine, and the pressure to appear confident. Kander’s message is clear: stop pretending you know and start asking what you’re missing. “When you ask the right question, innovation follows,” she says.

The real enemy of innovation is overconfidence. Success often leads to blind spots. When teams become too sure of their own brilliance, they stop seeking feedback. “When you feel like the smartest person in the room, you’ve stopped learning,” Kander warns. Instead, she champions humility, feedback loops, and relentless experimentation as the foundation for creative progress.

Too many teams fall in love with solutions, not problems. Kander urges innovators to flip that. “Spend less time pitching your solution and more time validating your assumptions,” she advises. Innovation fails not because ideas are bad, but because no one tests them fast enough—or honestly enough—to know.

Real innovation starts small and messy. One standout example from Kander’s experience involves a team testing a product idea in a grocery store. Instead of running expensive focus groups or building a full prototype, they simply acted it out in public. The responses they gathered on the spot helped them pivot instantly. The lesson? You don’t need polish you need proximity to reality.

Diana Kander offers three practical shifts every leader can make today:

1. Prototype fast and ugly. Don’t wait until an idea is perfect. Build the minimum version and get it in front of real users.

2. Kill your darlings. If you’re not challenging your own ideas, they’ll eventually be challenged by the market. Ask: What would make this fail?

3. Create safe failure zones. Build environments where people are free to experiment, fail, and learn—without career damage.

"You can’t learn and look good at the same time", Kander quips. That truth hits hard in performance-driven cultures where image often trumps insight. But growth requires risk, vulnerability, and the kind of honesty that makes learning possible.

The culture you build will either feed or choke innovation. Do you reward flawless execution or fearless learning? Do your team members hide failures or share them as lessons? Kander believes the companies that will win in the long term are those that treat curiosity as a strategic advantage, not a side note.

She knows this personally. Kander’s own journey is full of experiments, some that soared, many that didn’t. What separated the wins from the losses was how quickly she and her teams could learn, adapt, and try again. For her, curiosity isn’t just a mindset—it’s a muscle. And the best leaders train it daily.

Make innovation part of the way you lead. Not a department. Not a quarterly sprint. But an everyday discipline grounded in small tests, sharp questions, and fast feedback. That’s how organizations grow ideas that actually matter.

Text: Mia Heiskanen   Photos: Pasi Salminen   Visual: Nordic Business Forum/Linda Saukko-Rauta