Does success make businesses less curious?

I have a hypothesis that failure makes you ask questions and success makes you create answers.

If something isn’t working, you investigate. Why didn’t people buy it? What went wrong? What did we misunderstand? What should we change?

When something works brilliantly, you understandably try to work out why. You codify it. This is our customer. This is our positioning. This is the channel that works. This is why people buy us. This is our model.

And then you scale it.

Which is exactly what you should do.

The bit I find interesting is what happens five or ten years later when some of those answers are still sitting at the centre of the business but the world they were answering has moved on.

Success creates confidence, and confidence is useful. But I wonder if it can also slowly reduce curiosity.

You stop asking why the customer chooses you because you already know. You stop looking at strange little competitors because they’re tiny. You stop questioning category conventions because you helped create them.

Until one day something that looked insignificant isn't insignificant anymore.

I don't think the answer is to have established businesses behaving like nervous start-ups and questioning their entire existence every Tuesday.

But I do think there is value in deliberately reintroducing curiosity.

What are we no longer asking because we think we know the answer?

That feels like a pretty good place to start.