The Ambidextrous Organization: Balancing Performance and Reinvention

In an era of constant disruption, organizations that fail to adapt and innovate risk losing their competitive advantage. Research shows that even the most successful firms struggle to stay on top between eras of disruptive shifts: only half of the world’s 100 most valuable firms remained in the top 100 by the end of the next decade. The pace of this drop off has only accelerated. 

How do companies stay competitive? In the history of innovative companies, those that sustain outperformance can simultaneously run and reinvent the business. According to BCG, the next competition era will continue to be one of rapid change and high uncertainty, perpetuating a stronger need for constant reinvention. The answer lies in ambidexterity, the ability to balance operational excellence (exploitation) with continuous innovation (exploration), and curiosity is at the heart of this balance.

Curiosity fuels the search for new opportunities while ensuring organizations stay agile, resilient, and forward-thinking. Curious leaders and organizations don’t just react to change; they actively seek it out and shape the future.

This article explores how leaders can keep their organizations competitive amidst uncertainty and change by cultivating curiosity at every level:

1. Leader level - Curiosity as a leadership mindset 

2. Team level - fostering a culture of exploration within teams

3. Organization level - building an ambidextrous organization 

   
   

Level 1: Curiosity as a Leadership Mindset

Quoting organizational psychologist Stewart D. Friedman, "Curiosity about the world and questioning the status quo to open minds to alternative visions of the future are essential leadership skills. And they can be learned." While we usually think of curiosity as an innate value, leaders can consciously build this muscle and make it part of their daily practices. 

Curious leaders accept that they are not the ones with all the answers but the ones who ask the right questions. When faced with uncertainty, they don’t retreat into what’s familiar. Instead, they embrace and actively seek out and listen to diverse perspectives. Research shows that a one-unit increase in curiosity (for instance, a score of 6 rather than 5 on a 7-point scale) is associated with 34% greater creativity. Curiosity allows leaders to spot patterns, uncover blind spots, and connect seemingly unrelated ideas to inspire innovation.

But curiosity alone isn’t enough: it must be intentional and disciplined. Leaders who ritualize curiosity don’t just wait for inspiration to strike; they create habits and structures that make learning part of their daily practice. Google’s 20% rule shows exactly how much time to dedicate to learning and why it works. 

Level 2: Fostering a Culture of Exploration Within Teams

While individual curiosity is powerful, it becomes transformative when embedded into a team’s way of working. Teams that encourage inquiry, experimentation, and risk-taking don’t solve problems more effectively and create entirely new business opportunities.

A culture of learning is the foundation of curiosity. Teams that are fuelled by curiosity are encouraged to ask a lot of questions and openly share new opinions and perspectives. Asking questions like "why?" and "what if?" leads to deeper insights and better decision-making. 

Again, rituals are a structured way to implement a culture of learning within teams. For example, dedicating a day every quarter to research and learn about a new concept or organizing an annual hackathon to ideate creative solutions to improve team productivity. Fostering a learning culture could also be in the form of a group chat or slack channel where team members can share interesting findings with each other. 

As our CEO & founder Marilyn Zakhour explained in a webinar about building organizational resilience “Crises are a time to give employees the space to follow their learning, understand how the world is changing, and to be able to experiment with how they will serve their customers and communities.”  Beyond learning, curious teams embrace risk-taking and experimentation. In many organizations, fear of failure stifles innovation. While in growth-oriented teams, failure is reframed as a necessary step toward progress. Experimentation can be in the form of regularly exploring new features of a collaboration tool or rotating team members in diverse projects that are not necessarily their area of experience. 

A compelling example of this approach is Whirlpool’s culture of innovation. Faced with stagnation, Whirlpool’s leadership recognized that sustaining competitiveness required fostering innovation within teams. The company launched an initiative to engage employees in idea generation through an “I-box” strategy, inviting contributions from across the organization leading to 7,000 ideas, 300 small-scale experiments, and ultimately, $800 million in sales from innovative products and growth in annual revenue by 9 percent. 

Level 3: Building an Ambidextrous Organization 

As Walt Disney said: "We keep moving forward, opening new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths." 

Ambidexterity is defined as the ability to exploit present conditions by optimizing the current business model’s operations while exploring opportunities to redefine that business model by taking pioneering risks. Ambidextrous organizations resist the temptation to over-optimize for the present at the expense of the future. Instead of treating execution and innovation as conflicting priorities, they view them as complementary forces that drive sustainable growth.

Building an ambidextrous organization requires strategic, structural, and cultural changes. 

Strategic: A strategy that cuts across present and future horizons

Ambidextrous organizations succeed by balancing short-term performance with long-term

innovation, and Mckinsey’s 3 Horizons of Growth provides a structured framework to achieve this balance. Horizon 1, encompassing the Performance and Productivity Zones, focuses on optimizing core offerings and ensuring efficient operations—this is where companies generate most of their revenue and competitive edge. 

Horizon 2, the Transformation Zone, is where organizations scale disruptive business models into material, revenue-generating opportunities. This phase demands bold leadership and a willingness to reallocate resources from core operations to future-facing ventures. 

To fuel transformation, companies must invest in Horizon 3, the Incubation Zone, where emerging ideas, technologies, and markets are explored. While these innovations may not yet be profitable, they are essential for long-term reinvention.

Structural: An ambidextrous structure 

To make curiosity a lasting capability, organizations must design structures that support both efficiency and exploration. One way to achieve this is through dedicated innovation units, teams tasked with pursuing bold ideas without the constraints of day-to-day operations. These units allow organizations to experiment with emerging trends, test new business models, and incubate disruptive ideas while core business functions maintain operational excellence. 

However, true ambidexterity requires more than just separate units for execution and exploration. The most successful organizations create alignment between the two, ensuring that insights from innovation teams feed into execution and vice versa. This can be achieved through leadership team integration and a unified vision and values. 

Cultural: a culture of paradox 

Building innovative cultures requires balancing seemingly opposing behaviors. A tolerance for failure requires an intolerance for incompetence. A willingness to experiment requires rigorous discipline. Psychological safety requires comfort with brutal candor. Collaboration must be balanced with individual accountability.

Kodak and Fujifilm faced the same disruptive shift to digital photography, yet their responses shaped their fates differently. Kodak suffered from a culture of complacency, while executives claimed to prioritize innovation, their internal systems punished failure, ultimately leading to stagnation. In contrast, Fujifilm balanced discipline and experimentation which led to diversifying its product portfolio into healthcare, cosmetics, and digital imaging, ensuring long-term resilience. 

The future belongs to leaders and organizations willing to question, experiment, and embrace uncertainty. What steps will you take today to ensure that curiosity becomes your capability?