My previous article made the case that better marketing cannot fix a broken internal culture.

This one goes a step further.

If culture is a business foundation, continuous learning is what keeps it structurally sound.

Right now, too many businesses treat learning as something that happens on training days, in onboarding decks, or in the career plans of junior employees. Whereas, they neglect it as something leadership should model and takes seriously.

That gap is costing businesses more than they realise.

Starting with leadership

A founder who says they are too busy to read and learn is, with respect, describing someone whose business depends entirely on what they already know.

The market does not stand still. More so than ever!

Having an agile business, one set up for this new world, requires continuous learning.

That can look like:

• Reading widely, within the industry and across it: macroeconomics, behavioural science, cultural shifts, politics, things that seem unrelated until they suddenly are not
• Taking the time after every client conversation, pitch, or piece of feedback to ask what the encounter actually revealed about the market, about the approach, and about what needs to change
• Treating the ‘nos’ in new business as information rather than rejection: every declined proposal or lost pitch contains a lesson about positioning, timing, pricing, or fit that is more valuable than most formal training

The silo problem

Leadership teams tend to talk to themselves, and the same internal voices shape every decision.

External perspectives (like consultants and agencies) are also treated with suspicion, or simply never sought.

Insularity is a killer:

• 76% of employees say they’re more inclined to stay at a company that offers continuous learning and development (SHRM, 2022), and more than eight in ten HR professionals say training helps attract and retain talent. (source)
• Leadership training participants saw a 20% improvement in skill acquisition and a 20–28% boost in manager performance metrics (Gallup)
• High-potential talent is 3.7x more likely to leave within the next year if their manager doesn’t regularly provide opportunities for growth and development (ideas for leaders)

The businesses that understand the value from outside thinking are the ones who are genuinely invested in their future.

External perspective does something internal conversation cannot: it shows the business how it looks from the outside, challenges assumptions, and introduces thinking from adjacent fields and markets that would never emerge from within.

This is what is sometimes called ‘leveraged learning’.

The idea that the fastest route to better thinking is not always to think harder, but to borrow the thinking of people who have already solved similar problems, and to work with people whose job it is to hold that wider view.

It is also, incidentally, one of the reasons the agency and consultancy model is not going anywhere.

The generation coming through deserves better preparation

If the expectation entering professional life is that speed of output matters more than quality of thought, then we’re set for a rude awakening.

It reflects something about how young people are being prepared for work, and what skills are being treated as worth developing (and not).

Entrepreneurship and critical thinking, alongside the ability to communicate clearly and work through a problem, need to be consistently taught or rewarded. As does the continuity of learning.

That is partly why I set up First Flight.

It’s a programme built for 18 to 23 year olds, developed in partnership with AMV BBDO and Liberty Hive, it is an attempt to give young people entering the industry an environment where they are challenged to think rather than just produce. To develop real commercial instinct alongside the technical capabilities that everyone is rightly trying to build.

Curiosity is a choice, and I want to, and think we should all, keep promoting that.