Carey Ransom is a SaaS entrepreneur, executive, investor and advisor. He is president of Operate and managing director of BankTech Ventures, a strategic investment fund focused on technologies for community banks, founded and funded by leaders in the community bank ecosystem.

When do you make time to think?

You run a community bank. You are good at it. You know your customers by name, your staff trusts you, and you can read a loan committee the way some people read weather. And right now, none of that is the problem.

The problem is that the job you were trained for is not the job you have anymore.

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Margins are the headline worry again. In the 2025 CSBS survey, net interest margin overtook regulatory burden as community bankers’ top external risk, with core deposit growth right behind it. The big banks and the fintechs are competing for your best borrowers with pricing and speed you can’t match on instinct alone. Your most loyal customers are aging out, and so is your staff. And the technology shift in front of you is not the usual “new core every fifteen years” cycle. It’s faster, deeper, and it rewards the curious over the careful.

Here is the uncomfortable truth: you are spending almost all of your time reacting, and almost none of it thinking. The fires are real. But the fires are also a very convenient reason to never sit with the harder questions.

The banks that adapt over the next decade will not necessarily be the biggest or the fastest. They will be the ones whose leaders make time to think strategically, stay curious and build organizations that can keep learning as the industry changes.

So how do you lead so the people around you do it too? Here are a few suggestions to get the wheels turning.

1. Treat thinking time like a regulatory requirement.

You would never skip a board meeting or tell a regulator you were “too busy” for compliance. Strategic thinking deserves the same non-negotiable status. Block it. Protect it. Defend it the way you defend the things that have consequences, because this one does in the biggest ways.

Example: Two hours every Friday morning when you’re fresh and energized, door closed, phone in a drawer. Not for email. Not for one-offs. For the questions you keep avoiding.

2. Get curious in public.

The CEO who admits “I don’t fully understand this yet, please help me learn it” gives everyone else permission to do the same. The CEO who pretends to have it figured out teaches the whole organization to hide what they don’t know. Curiosity is contagious. So is fear. You decide which one your culture catches.

Example: Ask your youngest, most digitally-fluent employee to spend thirty minutes showing you how they actually use AI tools. Then tell the rest of the team you did it and what you learned.

3. Pick three priorities, not thirteen.

You cannot evolve everything at once, and trying to is how banks end up changing nothing. Name the three things that matter most for the next eighteen months, write them down, and say them often enough that your team can repeat them back to you. The demographic math is the reason this can’t wait: roughly 57% of community bank customers are over 52, and the average community bank customer is now more than five years older than the general population and getting older every day. The clock is not neutral.

Example: Deposit strategy. One real new technology bet and why. A plan for replacing the talent and the customers you’re about to lose.

4. Make the learning structural, not personal.

If curiosity lives only in your head, it dies the moment you get busy, which is always. Build it into how the bank runs. Celebrate learning and sharing. A standing item on every leadership meeting. A small budget for experiments that are allowed to fail. A rotation where people bring back one thing they learned from outside the bank.

Example: End every leadership meeting with one question: “What did we learn this week that should change something?”

5. Find the reverse mentors before you need them.

The people who understand where this is going are often not the ones with the most tenure or experience. Getting input from outsiders is no longer optional. A third of bank CEOs are expected to retire or depart within five years, the average community bank CEO is approaching 60, and 30% of banks either have no long-term succession plan below the CEO or don’t trust the one they have. These are the alarm bells ringing. Your edge is not pretending to be the smartest person in the room about technology or younger customers. It’s being the leader who finds the people who are, listens to them, and gives them room to push you to better answers and outcomes.

Example: The 26-year-old in operations who automated half her own job is worth more strategic conversation and input than most of the consultants you’ll pay this year.

You set the tempo for all of this. If you cancel your thinking time the moment things get busy, everyone learns that thinking is optional. If you keep showing up to it even when the week is on fire, you teach the organization that this is work, not a luxury. Then you delegate the curiosity instead of hoarding it.

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None of this requires more hours. You don’t have more hours. It requires deciding that the most important thing you do is not putting out today’s fire. It’s making sure the bank is still here, and still relevant, when the people who built it are gone.

The reactive stuff will always be there waiting for you. The thinking only happens if you choose it.

Start Friday. Or right now.