Four ways to foster curiosity
Why curiosity is lacking - and what we, as agency founders, can do about it
I’ve not written a blog for a few weeks. Writing these things tends to be a bit sporadic. I wonder if it’s because my natural state is listening and learning - taking things in that help me develop my knowledge and understanding - rather than broadcasting. This week, somebody said something that helped me understand why this might be no bad thing.
I was at a marketing conference hosted by one of our clients, PwC, and one panel discussion saw three agency leaders discussing the state of the world. One of them, a founder and CEO, was asked what his biggest worries were for his particular agency. First on his list: a lack of curiosity setting in.
Of everything I heard that day, this stuck with me the most. To me, curiosity seems essential to any consultancy or advisory business - and certainly for consultancies like ours, in the brand and creative world. Of course, I’m talking about ‘intellectual curiosity’ - a desire to acquire knowledge about the world, business, politics, science, humanity, whatever - rather than curtain-twitching nosiness.
This hunger for knowledge and understanding feels necessary if we’re to be useful to our clients. Creativity is so often about finding new connections between currently unconnected ideas. Building brands is all the more powerful when we can bring clients new ideas to be relevant, different or distinctive. To do all of this, we need to know shit. So curiosity matters. Massively.
So why might curiosity be lacking at the moment? And what can we do to turn that on its head? Four things came to mind for me - and I’ve given some thought to what we, as a consultancy, can do to actively counter them. Here are four ‘curiosity blockers’ and ideas for commitments to unblock them:
We spend too much time alone
*TRITE POINT KLAXON* Covid changed the way we live - by necessity for a while, then by choice after that. We worked from home for a couple of years because we had to, then we chose to keep doing it because it made our lives easier and cheaper. I’m a fan of flexible working and - as an introvert - I love spending time alone. But curiosity can suffer. I get inspiration and learn new things when I’m around other people, because thinking is also a group activity. And it needs to be unstructured and free-flowing time - not Zoom or Teams calls with tight agendas and strict cut-offs. You know, video meetings where we can (coughs guiltily) look at other tabs on our screen or generally dick about and not pay attention.Commitment #1. Make curiosity an activity. Spend dedicated conscious time together at least once a week - ideally physically rather than virtually. Unstructured time, to allow for serendipity. And make it compulsory to bring along a new idea, thought or discovery - on anything that’s captured your imagination, to share with everybody else. Big or small. Hell, bring along a movie or a song if it made you think, smile or despair. Who knows what we might get out of that?
We’re exhausted after the madness of the last few years
Let’s give ourselves a bit of a break. We’ve suffered the biggest mental health headfuck-inducing event we’ve experienced for a generation, i.e. the pandemic. Politics is a relentlessly depressing clown-show, with a never-ending stream of arguments, us-vs-them fighting and general energy-sapping bullshit. Nobody has any money left thanks to the crippling cost of living crisis. We’re mentally exhausted. And that’s terrible for curiosity. Terrible.Commitment #2. Encourage regular digital detoxes. Perhaps a day (or a short retreat) with no phones or laptops. No email. No social media. No news alerts. Only books, pens, paper and real human interaction. Make it OK not to reply to clients for a day or take ‘urgent’ phone calls. Be a haven from anxiety. Give people a break. Take the pressure off and see where it leads.
It’s easier than ever to give in to our inner child
As children, our identities are fragile. We want things that make us feel good (toys, sweets) and hate things that make us feel bad (falling over, being told off). For all kinds of reasons, I worry that we’re reverting back to this state as a species. (Don’t listen to me - buy Mark Manson’s book where he makes a very convincing case for it.) Rather than face the reality of the complex, painful world we live in, we can press a button and Netflix will numb our pain. TikTok will pump endorphin-inducing videos into our eyeballs. Instagram will show us the image of a world that makes us feel better, but is anything other than real. Like children, we’re reaching for the easiest solution to make ourselves feel good. But, as consultancies, we can’t give in to this. We need to be adults - engaging with the world in all its madness, difficulty and complexity, even when we don’t want to. Because our clients are paying us to be adults.Commitment #3. Lead by example and embrace difficult subjects, even if it’s uncomfortable or opens you up to challenge. At Simple Revolution, we’ve done a couple of things that I think help with this. We’ve had genuinely open discussions about the morality of the clients we work with - and embraced the difficulty, nuance and subtlety of the world we work in today, where there are few clear-cut answers to what the ‘right thing to do’ might be. We’ve been open about our finances, showing people what money we make and what we, as owners, do with it. We’ve started working with The Other Box, an amazing group of people who educate businesses on bias, diversity, equity and inclusion - as mainly older, white, middle-class business founders, this has made us vulnerable and exposed, but it’s the right thing to do…and we’ve all got so much out of the honest and open experience. Adults do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do. On the flip side, when we only do what makes us feel good, I believe we close our curious minds.
The algorithms remove serendipity
Where do we get our information today? Online, probably. And we all know about algorithms and how they simply feed us more of the stuff we already want to know, see and hear about. It’s the intellectual equivalent of Amazon telling us, “People who bought THAT also bought THIS.” What our curious brains need is a way to make the opposite happen: “People who read THIS and think about THAT have never heard about THIS.” We need to expose ourselves to situations and opportunities that we’d never consider. Remove ourselves from our little algorithm-fuelled bubbles.Commitment #4. Have “Unexpected Days”. Take your teams to unexpected places. Go to a new museum. Go for a walk, without a plan or a map - just go wherever the whim takes you. Book yourselves onto a cookery class, a watchmaking school or a woodwork lesson. Do a ‘Secret Santa’ but for books - and commit to reading whatever you’re given. Sooner or later, serendipity will make its way into your lives.
Right. Phew. Whether or not that’s been useful to you, it’s been massively useful to me. I might go quiet on the old blog again for a few weeks now. But that’s all fine, I think, because I’ve got to practice my curiosity…