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For children, curiosity is fundamental. It’s how they learn and understand, become creative and develop. Does that also go for adults in the workplace? Yes, it does, according to current research: curiosity is an important asset that needs to be cultivated.

If we think about working in clinics and surgeries, the top priorities are quality and safety. One important guarantor for stable processes are Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) – as they are defined in many areas of work. What they all have in common is that SOPs are based on experience, often written down in painstaking, small-scale detail and on the basis of trial and error and are intended as working instructions for future staff.

But are they making us too complacent? If, out of a sense of caution, all staff members stop trying things out and stop asking questions, it can get in the way of innovation. So caution is good, but it isn’t the be-all and end-all. We can describe it with an image. Caution is like a brake pedal. If you keep pressing it, you get down the mountain safely, but it takes a long time. Innovations generally owe their existence more to the accelerator pedal: you get down the mountain quickly, although not without a certain amount of risk.

In other words, caution is the hope of knowing more before the event than after; curiosity, by contrast, is the desire to know more after the event than before.¹ And isn’t that the aim? Curiosity and its significance in the work process have only relatively recently become the subject of scientific research. At the moment we can look back on a mere twenty years of research, more or less. What are the results so far?

The investigators concluded that comics make it possible to grasp complex content both verbally and visually, which improves understanding for different types of learners. Another advantage of this form of explanation is that, unlike a discussion or a video, comics allow the individual reader to take as much time as necessary to absorb the content.  

Despite these findings, comics have not yet seen much use in informed consent explanations, although international studies are now being conducted on the value of comics for patients with breast cancer³, infertility⁴ and anorexia nervosa⁵. The use of visual explanation does seem to be much more widespread in the Anglosphere than, for example, in German-speaking countries. Comics can be useful not only for complex examinations, operations and therapies but also, in particular, for topics that are emotionally difficult. Stories in pictorial form can help link feelings, worries and fears to facts and information much better than a discussion can.