WPP Enterprise Solutions’ Brent Taylor says rigid team lanes hold back growth

Brent Taylor of WPP Enterprise Solutions argues that companies built only to deliver efficiency risk discouraging the curiosity they need to keep growing.

No business can grow for long without finding better and faster ways of working, he says, which is why the best organisations put real effort into defining who does what, how teams work together and how success is measured. AI promises to push that efficiency further, speeding up processes and freeing people for work that needs their particular talents.

“Curiosity is not a peripheral virtue. It’s at the heart of growth,” Taylor writes. AI can create efficiencies by putting people in the right lane, he says, but they still need the freedom to step outside it when the timing is right.

Lanes without walls

Every organisation has unwritten rules that shape behaviour, according to Taylor, deciding who gets to speak, whose expertise counts, which boundaries can be crossed and which questions are rewarded.

He does not see clearly defined lanes as bad in themselves. Specialisation has obvious advantages and organisations need people with deep knowledge of their craft. The problem comes when people are walled off and expertise becomes isolated, with marketing, technology, finance and strategy each sticking to their own world, priorities and vocabulary.

He cites his time at Barrows, a retail experience and technology company, where lanes were kept well defined on purpose because specialisation gave the business its standing.

Barrows also chose not to wall any of them off. Staff with physical retail know-how were given real time with colleagues whose thinking centred on software and data. At first neither group was expert in the other’s field, which made the company less efficient for a while, but the result was Barrows Connected Store, a new business model Taylor says could not have come from either specialism alone.

“Structure gave us the discipline to execute. Curiosity gave us something worth executing,” he writes.

Designing for curiosity

A curious organisation, Taylor argues, gives people legitimate reasons to look beyond their specialism, encourages them to get to know colleagues whose work they only partly understand and creates projects that need several disciplines to solve a shared problem.

People need practical reasons, and permission, to work beyond the spaces they normally occupy, he says. In many organisations, promotion depends solely on mastery of one lane and rewards are tied to very specific goals. Meetings then become a performance in which the most senior person talks first and the rest of the room spends the hour validating the decision.

This may look like a question of culture, Taylor says, but it is ultimately about how an organisation is designed, and that design “can either expand curiosity or extinguish it”.

Questions and respect

Some workplaces have an unspoken hierarchy of questions, he says, where some show intelligence and others reveal ignorance. Employees soon learn which is which and become good at hiding uncertainty, especially in front of senior colleagues.

Making people feel safe to ask questions matters because the right one can change the direction of a conversation completely, Taylor argues. He wants asking a question to be treated as part of the work rather than something that slows it down, with leaders deliberately asking: “What are we assuming? What are we missing? Who sees this differently?”

He also wants conversations to reward how keen employees are to learn and who they can learn from, not only what they already know.

There is an interpersonal side as well. “Curiosity between colleagues is a form of respect,” Taylor writes. When one person takes a genuine interest in another’s knowledge, it can change how colleagues see each other, so that someone is more than a role on an org chart and becomes a person with valuable experience to share. He calls this essential to connecting people across a business.

The companies that keep growing and adapting are not always those with the most rigid and heavily optimised structures, he argues. They may be the ones with enough structure for accountability and enough openness for ideas, people and questions to move freely.

Future workplaces will use increasingly complex AI tools to unlock hidden efficiencies, Taylor says, but will still need room for people to use their own talents. However efficient AI makes an organisation, it will need to stay “open rather than sealed, inquisitive rather than defensive, connected rather than siloed”.

“Curiosity shouldn’t simply be a value printed on the wall. You need to make it visible in how people work, meet and make decisions,” he writes.