“My agency used to be really curious. They’re not anymore. And I really miss that.”
A client said that to me recently. What struck me wasn’t the criticism. It was the sense of loss behind it. They weren’t questioning the quality of the work, the talent or the commitment. The relationship was in good shape. The people were good. The work was getting done.
But something had shifted. The conversations had become narrower. There were fewer questions. Less exploration. Less challenge. Less of that feeling that somebody was genuinely fascinated by the world they were operating in.
The agency still had answers. Plenty of them. What it had stopped doing was collecting new dots. And for an industry increasingly obsessed with growth, that’s a problem. Curiosity isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s often what uncovers opportunity before anyone else spots it.
You can’t connect the dots unless you collect the dots
On the wall behind my desk is a phrase I’ve had for years: You can’t connect the dots unless you collect the dots. The more time I spend talking to clients and agencies, the more I think it’s one of the most underrated growth principles in our industry.
Growth rarely arrives neatly packaged as a brief. More often it begins as a comment in a meeting, a passing observation, a question nobody quite knows how to answer, a trend that doesn’t seem important yet, or a stakeholder saying one thing whilst meaning something else entirely.
It might be a customer behaviour that doesn’t fit the established narrative, a frustration that’s mentioned almost in passing, or a conversation that leaves you with a nagging feeling that something bigger is going on beneath the surface.
The best agency leaders I’ve worked with over the years understand this instinctively. They don’t just listen to the brief. They listen to everything around it. They’re interested in the context, the business, the stakeholders, the culture, the organisational dynamics and the tensions sitting just underneath the headlines.
They are constantly gathering information, observations and signals because they understand that growth often comes from connecting things that originally appeared unrelated. In other words, they’re collecting dots.
When efficiency starts replacing understanding
The irony is that agencies have never had more information available to them. We have dashboards everywhere. Research everywhere. Data everywhere. AI everywhere. Yet many clients tell us they experience less curiosity than they did two or three years ago. Not because people care less. Not because teams are less talented. Not because agencies have become less committed. Curiosity has simply been crowded out.
Meetings are shorter, timelines are tighter and teams are leaner. People are juggling multiple priorities, carrying heavier workloads and trying to deliver more in less time. The pressure to move quickly is understandable, but somewhere along the way I wonder whether we’ve started confusing efficiency with understanding.
We move rapidly from brief to solution, from challenge to recommendation and from question to answer, sometimes before we’ve properly understood the problem we’re trying to solve. I often think it’s a bit like watching the opening scenes of a film and immediately deciding you know how it ends. You might be right. But you might also miss the most important part of the story.
The best agencies and clients I know seem comfortable staying in that uncertainty a little longer. They probe. They explore. They ask another question. Not because they want to slow things down, but because they understand that the most expensive mistakes rarely come from asking too many questions. More often they come from reaching conclusions too quickly.
The value of being constructively disloyal
Recently I was reading the latest AAR Marketing Hot Seat interview with Emma Walker from Just Group and this comment jumped right out at me. She said she wants agency partners to be “constructively disloyal to the brief” and willing to say – “Hang on a minute. We’re here to help you solve the problem. The question you’ve asked maybe isn’t the right question.”
I loved that. Because for me, that’s curiosity in action.
Not curiosity as a personality trait. Not curiosity as an abstract concept. Curiosity as commercial value. The willingness to challenge assumptions, sit with ambiguity for a little longer and explore whether the thing everyone is rushing to solve is actually the thing that needs solving.
Yes it requires confidence, certainly, but it also requires genuine interest. Genuine interest in understanding what’s really going on, what might have changed, what might have been overlooked and where opportunity might be hiding. After all, growth rarely begins with a solution.
More often it begins with somebody noticing something. A contradiction. A tension. A change. A pattern. A possibility. The opportunity comes later. Curiosity comes first.
Perhaps we’ve been thinking about curiosity all wrong
Which brings me back to that client’s observation. “My agency used to be really curious. They’re not anymore.” Perhaps what they missed wasn’t the questions themselves. Perhaps they missed the feeling that somebody was still genuinely interested in discovering something new alongside them. Someone who wasn’t simply focused on delivering the answer, but who was still fascinated by the challenge.
The more I’ve reflected on this, the more convinced I’ve become that curiosity is far more important than our industry often gives it credit for. Not because it sounds good, but because it sits at the heart of growth, problem-solving and relationships. It helps us challenge assumptions, spot opportunities, understand context and occasionally see something everyone else has missed. The more I’ve explored curiosity, the more I’ve realised there isn’t just one story here – there are several.
Curious to know more. Good.
This is the first in a short series on curiosity and growth. In the next article I’ll introduce The AAR Growth Curiosity Model©, exploring the four different forms of curiosity that I’ve seen consistently uncover opportunity, deepen relationships and create value. Because if curiosity matters, the next question is where we should direct it.
After that, I’ll explore something I’ve become increasingly interested in: whether curiosity is really an individual trait at all, or whether the organisations that consistently outperform others have learned how to build something even more powerful, what I’m calling collective curiosity.
And finally, I’ll look at the practical side of curiosity and the role that questions play, because not all questions are created equal and the quality of our curiosity is often determined by the quality of the questions we ask.
One final thought
For now though, perhaps the challenge I’ll leave us all with today is a simpler one. Not whether we’re curious. But whether we’re creating enough space for curiosity to not just survive, but thrive. Because in a world increasingly obsessed with speed, efficiency and immediate answers, curiosity can feel slightly inconvenient. Yet I suspect it remains one of the most powerful drivers of growth available to us. Not because it gives us the answers, but because it helps us find better questions. And hasn’t growth always started there? With somebody pausing. Pondering. And asking one of those wonderfully “pesky” questions that changes what happens next.
Because you can’t connect the dots unless you’ve taken the time to collect them first.
