In marking 25 years of Informing Change, we took the opportunity to revisit our company’s guiding values. These were established when our company was founded and last updated in a pre-COVID world, and serve as a living indicator of where we are and guide us toward where we want to go.

To reflect our company and the world in which we operate today, we are evolving our previous value of intelligence into curiosity, which we believe is a term that both incorporates intelligence and better reflects the type of team we want to be: one with open minds and acknowledgment of other ways to surface the most insightful answers and lessons from our work. Curiosity also reflects the inherent human capacity for wonder, the power of asking the right questions, and the need to be comfortable in uncertainty, all part of work for systems change.

Each project and client we work with is unique, even if they share common features at first glance, with each case requiring its own approach to surface the most illuminating insights possible: an interview question reconsidered here, data looked at in different combinations there. Drawing on what we’ve learned from one project to deepen our thinking in another stems from a natural curiosity and willingness to try something different.

Thus, curiosity is in and joins our other existing values of integrity, compassion, and social justice. The perpetual pursuit of these four values guides everything we do: we carry out our work with these values in mind, and it is our ongoing goal that our work contributes to these values being lived out with our clients, their work, and the communities they work in.