The LMA Annual Conference kicked off in New Orleans with the keynote "Applied Curiosity: The Hidden Power Behind Breakthrough Ideas" that set the tone for the conference theme of Tradition & Transformation. Carla Johnson, Innovation Architect and bestselling author, challenged attendees to embrace curiosity not as a distraction from the work, but as the engine behind it.

Through a mix of personal storytelling and sharp case studies, she made the case that the firms and marketers who will win are not the ones who move fastest. They are the ones who ask better questions.

The Problem No One Wants to Name

Carla opened with a stat that landed in the room: 88% of executives expect the pace of change to keep accelerating, but 80% of those same executives do not believe their own people can keep up. That gap between the future leadership sees and the teams they are depending on is exactly where legal marketing sits right now.

Her argument: the answer is not more execution. It is curiosity, applied with intention.

Rewriting the Rules

Carla set up the central tension of the keynote with a simple observation: in any game, or any market, there are the rules as written and the rules as actually played. Monopoly is a useful illustration. After surveying over 1,600 customers, Hasbro found that more than 50% of games end in a fight, and over 60% of players admit to cheating. The obvious response would have been to tighten the rules and reduce friction. Instead, they asked a different question: what if we leaned into it?

They launched a dispute-resolution hotline for in-game arguments, and then went further, releasing the Cheaters Edition, where cheating is the whole point. Draw a card, skip paying rent, steal a property. Get caught, and you are handcuffed to the board.

They did not discard 120 years of tradition. They transformed the experience to stay relevant in a market that had moved on, which is exactly what the best version of Tradition & Transformation looks like in practice.

The Curiosity Compass

Before the case studies, Carla introduced a framework for understanding where our thinking actually goes: the Curiosity Compass.

• North — Strategic: long-term direction and purpose
• East — Exploratory: possibilities and alternatives
• South — Logistical: implementation and resources
• West — Tactical: immediate actions and solutions

Most marketing teams live almost entirely on the left side, in the efficiency zone (tactical and logistical) and the execution zone (strategic and tactical). That is where AI thrives, and it should. But the zones that differentiate, Discovery and Imagination, require human curiosity, and most teams rarely carve out time there.

Applied Curiosity: Three Steps, Three Case Studies

1. Sit with the problem – Hans Brinker Hotel

Hans Brinker is a budget backpacker hotel in Amsterdam with genuinely terrible online reviews. "Do not go, it is a prison with a big neon H." The instinct for most marketers would be to get out in front of it with a reputation management campaign, a response strategy, something to neutralize the damage.

GM Rob Penriss did none of that. He spent time in the lobby watching who actually stayed there. He realized his core customer, backpackers, did not want a Ritz-Carlton experience. They wanted a story to tell. So he doubled down on every bad review and built a campaign around it: "Sorry for being excellent at losing your luggage." The tagline: "Hans Brinker Hotel. It cannot get any worse. But we will do our best."

Empty rooms became a six-month waiting list, not because anything about the hotel changed, but because he understood his audience before he tried to fix his reputation.

2. Go down the rabbit hole – Diamond Shreddies

Shreddies cereal launched in 1939 with about 50 competitors. By the early 2000s, that number had grown to over 4,500. The brand was quietly dying, sitting on the top shelf of the cereal aisle, below the radar, barely remembered.

In a marketing meeting with no good answers on the table, a 26-year-old intern named Hunter Somerville picked up a piece of Shreddies, rotated it 45 degrees, and said: "What if we call these diamonds?" His boss said: go down the rabbit hole.

Hunter ran a focus group where participants swore the diamond shape tasted crunchier and nuttier. He launched a national vote across Canada where over 500,000 people participated, and diamonds won by 50,000. They relaunched: "Same 100% whole grain wheat. In a delicious diamond shape." Then came the combo pack, and then the Double Diamond Instagram campaign, where manufacturing defects became collectibles, turning a forgotten cereal into a lottery ticket with user-generated content from across the country.

None of that was in the original brief. It came from continuously asking "and then what?" and refusing to stop at the first idea that felt good enough.

3. Swap hats – Pediatric Surgery & Formula One

Dr. Martin Elliott, a pediatric heart surgeon at Great Ormond Street Hospital, spent five years trying to reduce a 30% error rate in the 15-minute handoff between surgery and the ICU. Cutting edge consultants, lean teams, Six Sigma, process mapping: nothing moved the needle.

One morning, exhausted after two surgeries, he looked up at a lounge TV and watched a Ferrari Formula One car complete a pit stop in 2.5 seconds. He called Ferrari's pit crew.

Two things changed everything. First, F1 pit stops have a single person in charge, the lollipop, who calls every shot. The surgery handoff had no such structure. Second, junior F1 team members were actively encouraged to ask questions. In surgery, you do not question the surgeon. He also brought in a professional choreographer to study how the team moved, turning what he described as a scrum into an orchestrated ballet.

Within six months, the error rate dropped by 20%. The answers had existed for years. They just were not in medicine.

What This Means for Legal Marketing

Carla closed with a line worth sitting with: “We are all born inherently curious and creative. But somewhere along the line, We trade our rabbit holes for roadblocks, and we're told: 'you’ve got to grow up, you've got to get realistic, that'll never work, you've got to think like we think, and so we do. We get logical. And tactical."

The LMA theme of Tradition & Transformation is easy to nod along to. Carla gave the room a way to live it. The through-line across all three case studies applies directly to where legal marketing is right now.

Firms with strong legacy practices sometimes struggle to shift perception as they grow into new services. The instinct is to distance from the old identity, when leaning into it as the platform to introduce what is new is often the more effective play. 

Firms navigating a rebrand, a merger, or a leadership transition tend to stop at the first repositioning idea that feels safe, when the more interesting and more defensible work starts just past that point. Most firms are still largely looking inward for answers, even as clients, competitive pressures, and business models are changing fast. 

The willingness to borrow a framework from an F1 pit crew, a choreographer, or an intern rotating a cereal square, and ask what it means for how you cross-sell, onboard, or tell your story, is exactly the kind of curiosity that separates execution from strategy.