Adventurousness — the Big Five facet that measures how comfortable someone is stepping into untested, ambiguous situations — is often the real reason a strong performer starts quietly disengaging from a job that looks, on paper, like it's going fine. It isn't a compensation problem or a management failure in the usual sense. It's a mismatch between how much novelty that person prefers and how much the role currently supplies. Close that gap with a defined, structural outlet for new challenge, and the disengagement usually resolves, without having to promote or reassign anyone out of a role they're otherwise good at.
In short:
- Adventurousness is one of six facets of Openness to Experience — comfort with untested approaches and ambiguity, distinct from Imagination, Intellect, or Liberalism.
- A high-Adventurousness employee doesn't usually leave a good job over pay. They leave because the role stopped generating anything new to solve.
- The warning signs look like distraction or restlessness, not poor performance — which is exactly why they get missed until the resignation letter.
- The fix isn't a promotion or a title change. It's a defined, recurring outlet for novelty built into the role itself.
- A low-Adventurousness colleague in the same seat needs the opposite: a stable, well-defined path, not more variety forced on them.
What Is Adventurousness, and How Is It Different From Openness Overall?
Openness to Experience is the broad Big Five trait that describes how drawn a person is to novelty, complexity, and intellectual exploration. Adventurousness is one of six specific facets inside that trait, and it captures something narrower: the willingness to try an approach that hasn't been tested yet, to step into a situation with no guarantee of how it resolves. At work, this is the person who volunteers for the project nobody else wants, not despite the uncertainty but because of it. It's a different flavor of Openness than Imagination (envisioning what doesn't exist yet) or Liberalism (questioning why a system works the way it does, a facet about convention rather than politics, and one the Big 5 at Work assessment doesn't score) — Adventurousness is about the doing, not the imagining or the questioning. Someone can score high on Openness overall while being only moderately adventurous, which is why two "creative" colleagues can look almost nothing alike in how they actually behave under uncertainty.
Why Does a High-Performing Employee Get Restless in a Job That's Going Well?
Not every job can be a constant stream of novelty, and plenty of roles genuinely require steady, predictable execution of the same tasks month after month — that's not a flaw in the role, it's what the role is for. The trouble starts when a highly adventurous person sits in one of those roles for long enough that the last unfamiliar problem has already been solved. Nothing is going wrong. Deadlines are met. Reviews are fine. But the thing that makes the work interesting to that particular person — the live uncertainty of "we don't actually know how this turns out yet" — has quietly disappeared. Left alone, that gap doesn't usually produce a dramatic exit. It produces a slow drain: less initiative, more time spent mentally elsewhere, a good employee who starts interviewing "just to see what's out there" for no reason anyone can point to.
How Do You Build a Recurring Outlet for Novelty Into a Role?
What works is a defined, recurring outlet for novelty built into an otherwise stable role, rather than one left to chance or good intentions. In Why You Need Neurotic People on Your Team, Christin Camacho makes a related point about Openness: when the genuine possibility of change closes off, the motivation to keep looking for better ways doesn't just shrink; eventually, it disappears, even when the role is otherwise a strong fit. Her suggestion for managers is to give people toward the higher end a defined space to experiment, such as a pilot budget, a sandbox project, or a standing time to pitch ideas. The fix isn't hoping they'll learn to enjoy the routine — it's building the variety in on purpose, on a schedule, so it doesn't compete with the core responsibilities of the job.
In practice, this can take a few concrete forms: a quarterly stretch project that's explicitly separate from day-to-day duties, a temporary cross-functional assignment that puts them somewhere genuinely unfamiliar for a few weeks, or a standing invitation to spend a defined slice of their time exploring a new approach to part of the existing process. None of this is an indulgence or a distraction from the "real" work. It's a release valve — a way to let a high-Adventurousness person get the variety they need to stay engaged, which is exactly what makes the necessary repetitive parts of the job sustainable for them over the long run.
A Manager Script for Setting This Up
The conversation doesn't need to be complicated. Something as direct as: "Your role needs steady execution most of the time, and you're genuinely good at that. I also know that kind of consistency runs against your grain long-term, so let's build in a defined stretch — one new, ambiguous thing each quarter — before it becomes a problem instead of after." Naming the trade-off out loud, rather than treating the restlessness as a character flaw to manage away, is usually what makes the difference.
How Do You Tell the Difference Between Novelty-Hunger and a Genuinely Bad Fit?
Not every case of restlessness is a novelty problem. If someone is unhappy with the actual substance of the work, the team, or the compensation, more novelty won't fix that. The distinguishing signal is specificity: a high-Adventurousness person who's otherwise engaged will usually describe the problem as "nothing here surprises me anymore," not "I don't like what I do" or "I don't trust this team." The first is a supply-of-novelty problem with a structural fix. The second two are different conversations entirely, and treating them the same way — offering a stretch project to someone who actually wants to leave the company — wastes everyone's time.
FAQ: Adventurousness at Work
Is Adventurousness the same as being reckless at work? No. Adventurousness describes comfort with untested approaches and ambiguous outcomes, not disregard for consequences. A highly adventurous employee can still be careful, thorough, and risk-aware about how they pursue something new.
How do I know if an employee is high in Adventurousness rather than just generally unhappy? Listen for specificity. Restlessness tied to Adventurousness usually sounds like "this has gotten too predictable," not dissatisfaction with the team, the mission, or the pay.
What if the role genuinely can't offer any variety at all? Very few roles are 100% fixed. Even a narrow, process-heavy job usually has a slice — a quarterly project, a cross-functional loan, a process-improvement experiment — that can be carved out deliberately as that outlet.
Does a low-Adventurousness employee need this same structure? No, and forcing it on them can backfire. Someone lower in this facet typically does their best work with a clear, well-defined path and does not need — or want — engineered ambiguity added to their role.
How is Adventurousness different from Liberalism, another Openness facet? Liberalism is about questioning existing systems and conventions (not politics, despite the name; the Big 5 at Work assessment doesn't score it) — asking "why do we do it this way?" Adventurousness is about willingness to act under uncertainty once a new direction is already chosen. A person can be high in one and only moderate in the other.
Related Reading
- Liberalism at Work: Why the Colleague Who Questions Convention Is Your Early-Warning System
- Emotionality at Work: Why Some Colleagues Sense a Culture Shift Before the Data Does
- DiSC vs. the Big Five: What's Different, and Why It Matters If Your Team Already Did DiSC
Christin Camacho is the author of Why You Need Neurotic People on Your Team and the creator of the Big 5 at Work assessment. Curious where your own Openness profile lands, and what it means for how you work? Take the free assessment at big5atwork.com/about/assessment.
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