Karl Stefanovic might not be the first person marketers look to for professional inspiration—despite his recent announcement as a speaker at this year’s Cairns Crocodiles. But in an industry that frequently talks about curiosity while rarely practising it, his willingness to step into uncomfortable conversations highlights something many organisations are quietly losing. In this op-ed, Curious Nation co-founder and managing director Meredith Cranmer argues that true curiosity – the kind that invites challenge, debate and different perspectives – is disappearing from modern workplaces.
Love him or hate him, Karl Stefanovic has never been short on opinions. But while promoting his new interview series, The Karl Stefanovic Show, it was something else that caught my attention. Curiosity.
“I have this curious beast that lives inside my head and I’m about to unleash that beast,” Karlos said ahead of the show’s much publicised launch. It was a colourful way to describe it, but a revealing one. Because curiosity, when it’s genuine, is not polite or passive. It is restless and pulls you towards people, conversations and perspectives simply because you want to understand them. Marketers can learn something from Karl’s instinct.
Some of the interviews featured on The Karl Stefanovic Show feature voices and viewpoints that many people, not just those working in the marketing and creative industries, would not instinctively gravitate towards. It would be easy to switch off, scroll past, or dismiss them entirely, but that response says more about us than it does about the content.
Real curiosity asks something harder. It asks us to stay in the conversation long enough to understand perspectives that sit outside our comfort zones. Because the moment we only engage with ideas that mirror our own worldview, curiosity disappears and echo chambers take hold. And for marketers, that is a dangerous place to operate in.
If our job as marketers is to influence culture and behaviour, we need to understand the people we’re trying to reach. Not just the audiences who look like us, think like us or move in the same cultural circles as us. You cannot influence people you refuse to understand.
Over the past year, almost every conference, panel or strategy session I’ve been to seems to land on the same word. ‘Curiosity’ is framed as the unlock for better strategy, the fuel for creativity and the trait marketers and creatives need most.
And the research backs this up. Studies from Harvard Business School show curiosity improves decision making, strengthens collaboration and leads to more creative solutions inside organisations. Other research links curiosity directly to stronger innovation performance, particularly in industries where solving new problems, such as marketing, is essential.
In other words curiosity is not just a personality trait, it is a real commercial advantage, but talking about curiosity is easy, being curious is something much harder. It’s not something that can be switched on at 9am on a Monday morning.
Added to that, modern working environments are not built for it. Most organisations reward certainty, speed and efficiency. Strategies need answers quickly and campaigns need immediate results. Teams are required to move rapidly from brief to execution.
But curiosity works differently, requiring us to slow down long enough to ask better questions and explore ideas that may not have an immediate outcome. Following the threads that do not yet have a clear return on investment.
Many companies say they encourage curiosity, but employees often experience the exact opposite, with deadlines, hierarchies and risk aversion quietly pushing people back towards safe, familiar thinking.
Curiosity rarely disappears because people lose interest, more often it disappears because the environment squeezes the life out of it.
There’s another challenge that receives less attention. Experience. The longer we spend in an industry, the easier it becomes to believe we already know how things work. Experience gives us pattern recognition and efficiency, but it also creates blind spots. We develop shortcuts, repeat strategies that worked before and filter the world through frameworks built on past success. While it’s efficient, it’s a curiosity killer.
Diverse teams and varied life experiences matter far more than many organisations realise, now more than ever and particularly when our world is increasingly shaped by algorithms, automation and optimisation. curiosity might be the most human advantage we have left.
Algorithms optimise the known, curiosity explores the unknown and this distinction matters. Forward thinking marketers don’t just talk about curiosity, they are the ones that design cultures to protect and grow it. Hiring talent that asks better questions, creating environments where exploration is rewarded and building teams with enough diversity to challenge assumptions.
Which brings me back to the curious beast that is Karl Stefanovic. Whether you love his interviews or vehemently disagree with his guest choices, it’s almost beside the point. The real value is the instinct behind them and the willingness to explore conversations others curiously might want to avoid.
