“How do we expand our thinking, not just our tools?”

Challenge

The team’s role is to generate new thinking for strategic customers, yet they found themselves:

• defaulting to familiar frameworks

• jumping quickly to solutions

• struggling to sit with ambiguity long enough for breakthrough ideas

• relying on a few dominant voices

They asked:

Intervention The Artful Method — Flexible Mind Lab™
75-minute virtual session · 18 participants

Focus: building flexible thinking and collaborative intelligence by slowing perception, questioning assumptions, and working with multiple perspectives in real time.

Before the workshop

• Fast to define the problem

• Anchored to first ideas

• Solution-mode over exploration

• “Expert mindset” limiting curiosity

After the workshop

• Held multiple interpretations before choosing direction

• Shifted from “answering” to inquiring

• More even contribution across the group

• Greater comfort sitting in ambiguity

• Actively surfaced assumptions

Participant reflection:

“I realized how quickly I jump to solutions — and how much richer our ideas became when we stayed curious longer.”

wHAT TO EXPECT

Business Impact (2-week follow up)

• Better upstream client discovery conversations

• More original, less template-driven ideas

• Shared language for challenging assumptions

• Stronger psychological safety in ideation

Outcome Statement
The team transitioned from solution reflex to exploratory intelligence, unlocking deeper insights and more original thinking.

FEEDBACK

“Unlocked and refreshed,” Tina, IN O.