It doesn’t begin with a bad decision. It begins with the absence of a question.

The death of a strategy is rarely announced with a trumpet. More often, it slips into the night, unnoticed, as people stop asking the one thing that once made them sharp: “What if?” 

Over time, this subtle erosion of curiosity becomes lethal. Processes get streamlined to the point of stupidity. Assumptions harden into doctrine. And soon, the most dangerous phrase in the building becomes, “That’s how we’ve always done it.”.

You see it in meeting rooms where the most dangerous ideas get edited out before they’re spoken. Where decks are over-polished and under-challenged. Where people quietly learn that challenging the norm is a career-limiting move.

When leaders stop wondering what they’ve missed, and teams stop imagining what they could become, the enterprise becomes a sort of fossil - preserved, but no longer alive.

Here’s a truth that should be printed on every strategy manual: You are only as relevant as your last good question. 

In a living, breathing system, curiosity isn’t just tolerated - it’s cultivated. Not as a chaotic brainstorming free-for-all, but as a disciplined practice of challenging defaults and unearthing blind spots.

Curiosity should not be the sole burden of the “innovation department.” It should be embedded in HR, finance, logistics, and the canteen.

Because when everyone in the organisation feels permitted to wonder aloud, you create the kind of anti-fragile system that doesn’t just survive change - it thrives on it.

From a systems thinking perspective, curiosity is the pulse of your culture. The questions being asked - or not asked - are your early warning signals.

A curious culture is a dynamic one. It self-adjusts. It spots drift before it becomes a crisis. It’s not a sandbox - it’s a radar.

Smart Questions to think about:

Prompt 1: Are your strategic sessions truly exploring the unknown - or merely justifying what you’ve already decided?

Prompt 2: What would happen if your organisation treated curiosity as a performance metric?