The power of curiosity
In several of my recent roles, part of my responsibility has been to help the agency as a whole develop more of a performance mindset. To support that, I created a simple checklist: “Ten ways of becoming more performance-focused.” I shared it with client, planning and media teams to highlight a set of behaviours and ways of thinking I believed really mattered.
One of the aims was to challenge the idea that “performance” belongs to a specific group of people, disciplines or channels, completely separated from broader brand thinking. Instead, I wanted to reframe it as a mindset, one that everyone, regardless of role, should cultivate.
The more I revisited the list, the more I noticed something interesting. Beneath the ten behaviours sat a single unifying principle. One idea from which all the others flowed.
Around that time, I read The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. Gawande became obsessed with simplification. Not as a way of dumbing things down, but as a way of making expertise usable under pressure. In designing surgical checklists that would actually be used (and save lives), he discovered a powerful rule: cut everything back to the absolute minimum of vital steps.
That idea stuck with me.
Without anything close to such lofty endeavors, it made me wonder whether my own list could be simplified in the same way. Whether there was one core behaviour that would give rise to the rest.
And there it was, mid-table, right in front of me:
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Be curious.
That’s it. That’s the foundation of a performance-focused mindset.
Because curiosity is the enabler. It’s what drives every other behaviour and means we ask the most valuable questions.
And this is why performance can’t belong to a single team, channel or job title.
A genuinely performance-focused organisation is one where everyone feels accountable for outcomes. Where planners, creatives, media teams and clients share a common curiosity about what’s working, what isn’t, and why.
Measurement plays a critical role here. It isn’t just a reporting function or scorecard, it becomes the common language that allows all stakeholders to connect their decisions and actions to real world outcomes that matter to a business.
Whatever you do in 2026, be more curious.
As you know, I teach at Westminster School, one of the most academically demanding schools in the world, and if there is one thing we do exceptionally well, it is enabling pupils to be curious. Our pupils’ success is not driven by rote learning or exam technique alone, but by being encouraged — from a young age — to ask why, to challenge assumptions, and to explore ideas beyond specifications. Curiosity turns bright pupils into deep thinkers and makes high performance a by-product rather than the goal. Crucially, curiosity is not innate; to my mind it is a skill that can be taught and nurtured, even where it doesn’t come naturally. The earlier pupils learn how to question, reflect and sit with uncertainty, the more powerful the impact. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if cultivating curiosity featured more explicitly in the current curriculum review led by Becky Francis? It feels like the missing thread that links reflection, learning and meaningful improvement.