For years, agency leaders thought of curiosity as a competitive advantage. Stay current. Learn new platforms. Understand emerging channels. The curious agencies would outpace their competitors.
That framing is now obsolete.
Curiosity isn’t a competitive advantage anymore. It’s the baseline requirement for survival. Agencies that maintain active curiosity will thrive while the rest coast toward irrelevance on outdated knowledge and assumptions.
This isn’t primarily about AI, though that’s one obvious example. This is about the fundamental changes happening in how buyers make decisions, how services get delivered, how audiences consume information, and how value gets created.
Agency owners who aren’t actively curious about these shifts aren’t making a neutral choice. They’re making a choice to decline.
“That’s how we’ve always done it” is a red flag
I never liked it when an agency owner told me “that’s how we’ve always done it,” but I hear something different today than I did five years ago.
In the past, it was an answer that suggested a high potential for inefficient or ineffective activity.
Today, it indicates material risk.
Consider media relations. Agencies that continued pitching traditional outlets the same way they did a decade ago — because that’s how they’d always done it — watched their placement rates plummet as newsrooms shrank.
The process didn’t change. The world around it did.
Agencies that stayed curious about where audiences actually consumed information pivoted to podcasters, newsletter publishers, YouTube creators, and industry-specific platforms. They kept the core skill of storytelling and relationship building while adapting the execution.
The difference wasn’t intelligence or resources. It was curiosity about what was actually happening versus what they assumed (or hoped) was still true.
“That’s how we’ve always done it” has become shorthand for “I haven’t questioned whether the conditions that made this work still exist.”
In a stable environment, that would be bad enough. We’re not in a stable environment.
The media parallel
Listen to media professionals complain about the decline of mainstream journalism. Shrinking newsrooms. The death of local papers. The rise of clickbait. The erosion of standards.
All true. All legitimate. And all largely missing the point.
Lamenting the old model doesn’t change reality. The publications that survive – for now at least – adapted. They questioned their assumptions about how journalism should work, how it gets funded, and how audiences want to consume it.
Now apply that same lens to agency owners. How many are lamenting industry changes while failing to question their own assumptions? Complaining that clients want shorter commitments without examining why buyer behavior shifted. Frustrated that traditional tactics don’t work as well without exploring where decision-makers actually get information now. Annoyed that pricing pressure increased without understanding what created it.
Curiosity isn’t about being optimistic or pessimistic about change. It’s about actually understanding it rather than wishing it would go away.
Curiosity as a leadership discipline
Curiosity at the leadership level isn’t about being interested in everything. It’s not about constantly chasing new tools or platforms.
It’s a discipline. A practice of regularly questioning your assumptions about how your market works.
That discipline shows up in specific behaviors: You actively seek information that might contradict what you believe. You talk to prospects who didn’t hire you to understand why. You investigate why a competitor’s positioning is resonating. You pay attention when three different sources mention the same trend. You ask “why is this changing” rather than “how do I get it to stop changing.”
You maintain perspective on which changes matter. Not every new platform deserves your attention. Not every industry shift impacts your specific positioning.
But you can’t make that judgment without first being curious enough to investigate. The agency owners who dismiss everything new are just as lost as the ones who chase everything shiny.
You create space to think. Curiosity requires time. If you’re constantly fighting fires, you won’t notice the market shifting around you until it’s too late.
This is why so many agency owners are busy but uneasy—they’re so focused on execution that they’ve stopped being curious about whether they’re executing the right things in the right way.
Ultimate responsibility rests with owners
You can delegate execution. You cannot delegate awareness.
Your team needs to be curious about their craft, their specialties, their tactical execution. But you own the responsibility for understanding your market, your buyers, your competitive positioning, and your business model. That’s not something you can outsource to your account managers or other team members.
I see two dangerous patterns. The first is owners who are too busy running the business to stay curious about the business itself. The second is owners who confuse activity with curiosity. They attend conferences, they read newsletters, they follow industry accounts, but they never actually integrate that information into decisions.
Curiosity at the ownership level means you’re the one connecting dots between what’s changing in your service delivery, what buyers are saying in sales conversations, what competitors are doing, and what that means for your agency’s direction. Nobody else has that vantage point. Nobody else has that responsibility.
Curiosity must be part of your culture
Owner curiosity isn’t enough if it dies at the leadership level, of course.
Your team must be involved but needs permission and encouragement to question assumptions, explore new approaches, and bring forward information that challenges the status quo.
They need time and space to explore new tools and ideas, just like you do.
The agency owner sets the tone. If you react defensively when someone questions a long-standing process, your team learns not to question things. If you dismiss new information because it’s inconvenient, your team learns not to share inconvenient truths. If you reward people for following the playbook and punish people for experimentation, don’t be surprised when nobody experiments.
Actions matter more than words. When the team brings forward a new idea or insight, what happens? If nothing ever changes, they stop speaking up.
Standing still is still a decision (often not a good one)
Agency owners sometimes talk about deciding whether to adapt as if maintaining the status quo is a neutral, safe choice and change is the risky option.
That’s backwards.
Standing still is a decision with consequences. When your market is shifting — and it is — choosing not to adapt means choosing to become less relevant. You might have enough momentum to coast for a while. You might serve clients who are slow to change themselves. But you’re not avoiding risk by standing still. You’re selecting a different risk: the risk of decay and decline.
The curious agency owner recognizes this. They’re not adapting because change is exciting (though it can be) or because they love disruption (even if they do).
They’re adapting because they’ve been curious enough to recognize that the assumptions underlying their current model have shifted, and they’d rather adjust deliberately than be forced to adjust reactively.
Now what?
If this resonated, here are three simple ways to start applying it:
- Pick one core assumption about your business and actively investigate whether it’s still true. This might be how clients prefer to work with you, what results matter most to them, or which services they truly value. Spend time really understanding what might have changed – and why.
- Have a regular “curiosity conversation” with someone outside your usual circle. That might be a client in a different industry, an agency owner with a different model, or a vendor who works with your competitors. It might be the same peer or advisor every month, or you might mix it up. The goal isn’t networking. It’s perspective.
- Create one clear signal that your team is encouraged to question assumptions. This could be a standing agenda item, a dedicated Slack channel for rethinking how things work, or a simple question you ask consistently in one-on-ones. Then pay attention to what surfaces — and what you do with it.