What do toddlers, ChatGPT, and your executive team have in common?
They all do exactly what you've primed them to do.
Tell a toddler "don't climb on the table" and watch what happens. Their brain has to visualize the table, visualize climbing, negate the action, then generate an alternative. You've anchored them to the table while asking them to avoid it.
Tell your team "think outside the box" and you've done the same thing. You've activated the box. Now they're thinking about the box while trying to escape it.
This isn't a discipline problem. It's architecture.
The brain is a miser
Cognitive scientists Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor coined the term "cognitive miser" in the 1980s. The idea is simple: your brain defaults to the least effortful mental strategy that produces an acceptable outcome.
This isn't laziness. It's survival.
Your brain burns about 20% of your calories despite being 2% of your body mass. Our ancestors who carefully deliberated every decision got eaten while they were still weighing options. So the brain evolved to conserve energy by automating as much as possible—relying on heuristics, pattern matching, and cached solutions.
The result: we satisfice rather than optimize. We take the first answer that clears the threshold rather than searching for the best one. We substitute hard questions for easy ones without noticing. "Is this strategy sound?" becomes "Does this feel familiar?"
This works most of the time. It's why you can drive home without remembering the route. It's why expertise feels like intuition.
But it's also why your best thinkers produce their worst ideas in the room you built for strategic thinking.
Expertise is a groove
There's a principle in neuroscience: neurons that fire together wire together. Every time you run a thought pattern, you strengthen that pathway. The connection becomes faster, more efficient, more automatic—and more likely to fire again.
This is how expertise forms. A chess master doesn't deliberate over basic positions. A seasoned operator sees a deal structure and pattern-matches instantly to similar situations. The response feels like perception, not thought.
But those strong connections create channels. Mental water flows where the grooves already are.
The more expertise you build, the deeper the grooves, the harder it becomes to see the situation differently. Your existing knowledge isn't sitting there passively. It's competing for activation. And it usually wins.
This is why your most experienced people can be your biggest barrier to seeing differently. Their pattern recognition is simultaneously your greatest asset and the thing that keeps you stuck.
The boardroom is a prompt
Here's where it gets interesting.
Every environment is saturated with cues that trigger particular cognitive modes. The boardroom has the familiar chairs, the whiteboard, the implicit hierarchy of who sits where. Your brain pattern-matches to every other meeting held there and loads the same routines.
The room itself is a prompt. And most strategy rooms are badly prompted.
You've anchored everyone in "meeting mode" before anyone speaks. You've activated the cached patterns, the political positioning, the performance of competence. Then you ask people to think beyond what they already know.
It doesn't work. Not because your people aren't creative. Because you've designed creativity out of the room.
Why "be creative" fails
When you tell someone to be creative, you're asking them to perform a vibe. The brain has seen thousands of examples of what "creative" looks like and pattern-matches to that archetype. You get creativity signifiers—unexpected metaphors, playful divergence, breaking convention for its own sake—rather than genuinely novel problem-solving.
This applies to humans. It also applies to large language models.
Tell an LLM to "be creative" and you've grounded it in performing creativity. You get the costume, not the cognition. The model is pattern-matching to what creative outputs look like in its training data.
What works better? Structural freedom. Perspective shifts. Removing constraints explicitly.
"Give me ten different approaches, including impractical ones" forces exploration without asking for performance.
"How would a marine biologist approach this?" actually changes the frame rather than loosening it.
"Ignore feasibility for now" removes a constraint instead of invoking what you're trying to escape.
The same interventions work on humans. Stop telling people to think differently. Put them somewhere that makes different thinking the path of least resistance.
The cocktail napkin isn't an accident
Everyone knows the cliché: the breakthrough idea sketched on a cocktail napkin. We treat it like folklore. A charming story about how creativity strikes at random moments.
It's not random. There's a reason the napkin works and the whiteboard doesn't.
The bar is a novel environment. No hierarchy cues. No one sitting at the head of the table because there is no table. The brain registers unfamiliar context and loosens its grip on cached patterns.
You've had a drink. Not enough to impair judgment, but enough to quiet the prefrontal cortex's threat detection. The inner critic softens. Half-formed ideas feel less risky to voice.
You're with colleagues, but the social contract is different. This isn't a meeting. No one is performing competence. Status signaling drops. "Here's a crazy thought" costs nothing.
There's no agenda. No slide deck anchoring everyone in last quarter's problems. No facilitator asking you to "ideate" on a prompt that's already constrained the solution space.
The napkin itself matters. It's small. Impermanent. Low fidelity. You're not writing a proposal—you're sketching a possibility. The medium signals "this doesn't have to be right."
You haven't become more creative at the bar. You've stopped suppressing the creativity you already had.
The neurochemistry of helping others
Here's a pattern I've noticed in my own work: when I'm stuck on a problem, the worst thing I can do is grind on it harder. The best thing I can do is help someone else with their problem.
This isn't procrastination. There's neurochemistry behind it.
When you shift into helping mode, you trigger oxytocin release. This reduces amygdala activity—less threat vigilance, less defensiveness. Your brain literally becomes less guarded.
Solving someone else's problem gives you a dopamine hit without the learned helplessness attached to your own stuck situation. Your reward system reactivates.
Their problem doesn't carry your stress. Lower cortisol means more prefrontal resources available for exploratory thinking.
Being helpful, being the one with something to offer—this engages serotonin pathways. Subtle mood elevation makes cognitive flexibility easier.
You return to your own work neurochemically different. Not because they gave you advice, but because you accessed parts of your own thinking that your routine context never triggers.
This has implications for how we structure work. Getting out into the community, helping others with their challenges—it's not just good citizenship. It's cognitive cross-training.
The environment is the intervention
Most facilitation does the equivalent of "don't climb on the table." It defines constraints, recaps last quarter's problems, establishes what's off limits. All of that anchors participants in the existing frame while asking them to transcend it.
The alternative is to design the environment, the pre-work, the physical space, and the social dynamics to point toward something—without activating what you're escaping from.
Instead of "we need to break out of our current pricing model," which loads all the reasons the current model exists, you put people in a context where they're thinking from the customer's lived experience forward. Or from a future state backward. Or from an adjacent industry's logic entirely.
You don't try to change how people think. You change where and how they're convened.
Practical implications
If you're designing a strategy session:
- Change the physical environment. Somewhere unfamiliar. Somewhere without hierarchy cues. Movement beforehand if possible.
- Use pre-work that activates different frames. Ask people to interview a customer, or research an adjacent industry, or describe the problem from a competitor's perspective—before they arrive.
- Lower the stakes explicitly. First ideas are supposed to be bad. Say it out loud. Make "wrong" safe.
- Prime with a perspective shift, not a problem statement. "How would Costco approach our margins?" lands differently than "How do we improve our margins?"
- End with generative activity, not decisions. Decisions trigger defensive cognition. Generation keeps people in exploratory mode.
- Build in community exposure. Get your team helping others with their problems. It's not a distraction from strategic thinking—it's preparation for it.
The reframe
The question isn't how to make your people more creative.
The question is what environment you're putting them in.
Creativity isn't a skill to be trained. It's a default state to stop suppressing. Your team already has the capacity for novel thinking. The boardroom, the routine, the familiar cues—these are what narrow the aperture.
The cocktail napkin works because everything about that moment—the space, the stakes, the social contract, the medium—gives the brain permission to explore.
Your job isn't to teach people to think differently. It's to stop putting them in rooms that make different thinking expensive.
Environment > Exhortation.
That's the intervention.