The key to great ideas is to prime the group before you ever get in the room. Send these questions in advance:

• What is the question we’re solving for?

• What outcome do we want?

• What will be expected of us during and after the workshop?

• What do we need to know to prepare well?

Aha Moment Two: We Are Neurologically Wired Differently

Here are the main thinking styles you’ll find in any room:

Systems thinkers see the world as interconnected wholes. They track feedback loops, cause and effect, and the unintended consequences that others miss.

Pattern thinkers work through association and analogy. They spot recurring structures across different domains, and are often visually or musically inclined.

Verbal and logical thinkers think in words and sequences. They’re strong at language, debate, and working through problems step by step.

Visual-spatial thinkers think in pictures, dimensions, and three-dimensional relationships. You’ll find them in architecture, engineering, and design.

Associative and divergent thinkers make unexpected leaps between seemingly unrelated ideas. This is the engine behind lateral thinking and creative problem solving, and it’s commonly associated with ADHD cognitive profiles.

Narrative thinkers organise information as stories. They remember context, characters, and meaning far better than abstract frameworks.

Categorical thinkers naturally sort and classify. They bring structure, clarity, and analytical rigour to complex information.

The Neurodivergent Connection

Many of these styles map onto neurodivergent profiles:

• Autistic cognition often involves pattern, visual-spatial, and detail-focused thinking

• ADHD cognition tends to be associative, divergent, and interest-driven

• Dyslexic cognition is often strongly visual-spatial and narrative, with weaker sequential processing

I’ve wondered for years why facilitation feels natural to me, and why certain things that are hard for others seem easy. The answer is that I have autism, which masks my ADHD fairly well, and you can throw a splash of dyslexia in there too.

But here’s the key insight: none of these styles is superior. They’re complementary. Which is exactly why cognitively diverse teams tend to outperform homogeneous ones on complex problems. You want a range of thinking styles in the room, and you want a range of thinking modalities to draw the best ideas out of people.

That requires a structured approach to the entire process, from briefing through to ideation, from ideas through to evaluation, decision making, OKR creation, and execution.

Turning up, jotting down a few ideas, and picking the ones that feel right is not strategic planning.

How We Optimise the Ideation Process

The right skills, frameworks, processes, and rituals matter. And you shouldn’t need to rely on people like me indefinitely. You want people like me to give you what you need to do this well across the whole company.

Here is how we approach it:

1. Prime participants in advance We send a written briefing before every workshop, and sometimes meet participants beforehand to understand how they think and what they know.

2. Prepare the session carefully We schedule the work that requires the most brain power for the right time of day, and protect against trying to do heavy lifting when energy is low.

3. Use the right facilitation tools Sometimes that’s a virtual whiteboard like Miro, sometimes it’s stickies on walls, and sometimes it’s a spreadsheet. All of it needs to be set up and ready before anyone walks in.

4. Manage time with skill Time-boxing matters, but there’s a competing principle we follow called right-timing a conversation. I’ve been in workshops where a topic was allocated an hour, we’re nowhere near finished, and the CEO wants to move on. Knowing when and how to flex the schedule is a real skill.

5. Keep the momentum going When teams leave an ideation session, they’re energised. You want to bottle that. The gap between the workshop and acting on it needs to be as short as possible.

6. Learn by doing When we’re helping a team create OKRs for the first time, we guide them through defining objectives and measurable outcomes before they even realise they’re planning OKRs. Then, before anyone’s noticed, they’ve drafted one, and the training can focus on work they understand and are genuinely connected to, rather than an abstract example on a slide.

What Do Do When the Ideas You Need Aren’t in the Room?

There’s a particular kind of frustration that comes when you’ve done everything right. You’ve primed the team, you’ve got the right people together, you’ve created the space. And then the ideas come in, and they’re fine. Perfectly reasonable. Incremental. Safe.

Me too thinking. Business as usual with a fresh coat of paint.

When this happens, it’s tempting to conclude that the team isn’t creative enough, or that the market doesn’t offer much opportunity. Almost always, that conclusion is wrong.

What’s actually happening is that your team is thinking inside a box they can’t see. Their experience, their context, and their proximity to the day-to-day are all shaping what feels possible to them. And when people can’t see the box, they can’t think outside it.

So how do you break that?

Change the reference points. Me too ideas come from looking at the same competitors, the same customers, and the same market you’ve always looked at. Look deliberately elsewhere. What are companies in adjacent industries doing? What would a challenger brand do if it entered your space tomorrow with no legacy and no fear? These questions force the brain onto unfamiliar ground, and unfamiliar ground is where new ideas live.

Challenge the assumptions underneath the brief. Often, the reason teams produce safe ideas is that the question they’ve been given is a safe question. If you ask people to improve what you already do, they’ll improve what you already do. Reframing the question is often more powerful than any other single intervention.

Bring in outside perspective. This might be a customer who tells you something uncomfortable, a researcher who surfaces data that challenges the consensus, or a voice from outside the industry entirely. Fresh eyes don’t just add ideas; they expose the assumptions that were invisible to everyone inside the room.

Separate idea generation from idea evaluation. One of the most common killers of bold thinking is that evaluation happens too early. When teams know their ideas will be judged immediately, they self-censor. Give people permission to generate without judgment first, and the quality of what comes shifts noticeably.

Use AI to expand the possibility space. You can use AI to generate a deliberately wide range of strategic options, including ones that feel uncomfortable or counterintuitive, and use those as provocations to push the team’s thinking further. You’re not necessarily adopting the AI’s ideas. You’re using them to stretch what the team considers possible. Sometimes one provocative option on the board is all it takes to unlock the idea that was hiding just beyond what felt acceptable.

The goal isn’t to manufacture creativity. It’s to remove the invisible ceiling that’s keeping your team’s thinking small. And this is where something significant is happening right now, something that’s changing what’s possible in the ideation process in ways that would have been hard to imagine even a few years ago.

AI isn’t replacing the thinking. It’s enhancing it.

AI Is Changing What’s Possible

Take idea evaluation. Historically, a team would generate a long list of ideas, and the best ones would be selected based on a combination of experience, gut feel, and whoever argued most convincingly in the room. That’s a flawed process, and we’ve always known it. AI is beginning to change that by bringing evidence into the conversation in real time. You can stress-test an idea against market data, competitor intelligence, or historical outcomes almost instantly. The quality of the decision improves because the information available to make it improves.

The same is true for beliefs and assumptions. One of the most important, and most overlooked, parts of strategic planning is surfacing the assumptions that are driving your thinking. Teams often build strategies on beliefs they’ve never examined, and AI is becoming a powerful tool for challenging those assumptions constructively. Ask it to steelman the opposite view, to identify where the evidence doesn’t support the consensus, or to highlight the risks the team hasn’t considered. It does this without the politics, without the hierarchy, and without anyone losing face.

But perhaps the most exciting shift is what’s happening inside workshops themselves. We’re starting to work with organisations where a dedicated researcher is in the room, using AI to pull relevant data, case studies, and evidence in real time as conversations develop. Imagine a team debating whether to enter a new market, and within minutes having a synthesis of recent market data, analogous moves by competitors, and examples of where similar bets have succeeded or failed. The conversation changes completely. You move from debate based on opinion to dialogue grounded in evidence.

The good news is you don’t need to have that capability in-house. We bring it with us. Our consultants are experienced in deploying AI research in live workshop settings, so your team can focus entirely on the thinking and the decisions, while we handle the evidence layer.

A year ago, the idea of live AI prompting shaping a strategic conversation in almost real time would have sounded like a stretch. Something for the future, not for a workshop happening next Tuesday. But it works. We’ve seen it work. And once a team experiences it, they don’t want to go back to the way things were.

This doesn’t remove the need for great facilitation, diverse thinking styles, or the human judgment that ties it all together. If anything, it raises the bar for all of those things. What it does is compress the gap between intuition and insight, between a good idea and a well-evidenced one.

The teams that learn to combine structured human thinking with well-deployed AI will have a significant advantage. Not just in the quality of their strategies, but in the speed at which they can develop and test them.

The Bottom Line

Great strategy doesn’t come from the loudest voice in the room or the person with the most slides. It comes from creating the conditions where different minds can do what they do best. When you get the process right, when you prime people well, when you design the right question, when you build in the right structure and space, and when you bring the right evidence into the room at the right moment, the ideas that emerge will surprise you.

That’s what we’re here to help you do.