The Missing Process Behind Better Strategic Thinking
Strategy brainstorming sessions produce detailed plans without generating meaningful strategic insight. Let’s explore why strategic conversations often become operational conversations, the difference between divergent and convergent thinking, the five stages of strategic thinking, and the role leaders play in protecting the process long enough for better ideas to emerge.
Why Smart Teams Stop Thinking Boldly
Many leaders assume innovation slows because organisations become complacent or bureaucratic. More often, the problem is behavioural. Ideas, risks, and opportunities are still noticed, but fewer make it into decision-making conversations. Let’s explore what former innovation leaders such as Kodak, Nokia, and Blockbuster can teach us about the behavioural dynamics that make it or break it.
Seeing the Report Is Not the Same as Understanding It
A senior leader comes into a coaching session with his Lumina Spark portrait already reviewed with HR, where the conclusions seemed straightforward and the development areas were clear. As we began to work through the profile together, a different picture started to emerge, one that had been visible in the data all along but had not yet been interpreted, and what followed was not a new assessment, but a deeper decoding of the same one and an immediate shift in how the leader understood his own behaviour.
Most Leadership Assessments Don’t Fail at Measurement. They Fail at Meaning.
The leadership industry has built a sophisticated ecosystem of assessments. From behavioural models to cognitive testing, organisations can now measure almost every dimension of human capability. On paper, this should eliminate blind spots. In practice, it often multiplies them. The issue is not complexity. It is fragmentation. Each tool captures a different slice of reality, yet few leaders are trained to integrate these perspectives into a coherent view of performance.
When Opportunity Arising From Conflict Is Not Being Used
In this organisational coaching session I led for my client, a leadership team gathers for a board meeting expected to focus on business performance. What unfolds instead reveals a deeper dynamic: authority that is formally assigned but informally overridden, conflict that surfaces but is never resolved, and trust that cannot fully develop. What appears to be a governance issue is, in reality, a systemic breakdown across psychological safety, trust, and leadership role clarity.
