Walk into most strategic planning sessions and you'll find flip charts full of SWOT analyses, logic models, and implementation timelines. There's nothing wrong with any of these tools. But if they're the only tools you use, you're planning with one-third of your available intelligence.
The House Model
I think of the human mind as a house. On the first floor, there are two rooms: Thought and Intuition. Underneath is a basement: Emotion.
Here's the critical insight: the door between Thought and Intuition only works one way. You can walk from Intuition into Thought, but you cannot go in the opposite direction. To get from Thought to Intuition, you have to go through the basement.
Most strategic planning sessions stay on the first floor, in the room of Thought, for the entire process. That's not planning — it's rearranging furniture in one room of the house.
What Lives in Each Room
Thought is our cognitive process — applying logic to facts to draw conclusions. You can have a perfectly good meeting using thought alone. People share information, test different logics, and make reasonable, defensible decisions. Most meetings never leave this room. Most strategic plans never leave this room.
Emotion is the bodily, transitory experience of feelings — feelings that shape what we think and commit us to logics we've learned that meet an emotional need. When we feel angry, we argue. When we feel sad, we withdraw. And crucially, how we feel shapes what we think. To change what a person thinks, you must first address how they feel.
This is the part most planning processes skip entirely. But Emotion is the basement, and the basement is the only way to get to the other side.
Intuition is the capacity for awareness of the whole of a situation and of the appropriate actions one might take. It's the space of creative clarity you enter once you've released your emotional hold on your current, limited way of thinking. This is where the impossible becomes possible.
Why You Can't Skip the Basement
You can't walk into a planning retreat and say "OK, everyone, be creative!" You can't jump directly from a SWOT analysis to a bold new vision. The door between Thought and Intuition doesn't open that way.
The basement is scary. It's dark. You don't know what's down there. But if you make it through, you reach Intuition on the other side — and that's where people can actually change.
In practice, this means strategic planning needs to deliberately engage with what people are feeling. What are they afraid of losing? What are they proud of? What worries keep them up at night? These aren't soft questions — they're the most strategically important questions in the room. Until you address them, you're stuck in Thought, producing plans that are technically defensible but that nobody's heart is in.
The Journey of a Great Strategic Plan
A great planning process looks like a journey through the house:
You start in Thought to create a common understanding of the problem as currently defined — a framework for understanding. This is where you review the data, share information, and make sure everyone sees the same landscape.
You pass through Emotion to unpack limited thinking and deepen the group's motivation to excel together. This is where you surface the fears, the pride, the unexpressed tensions that are actually driving people's positions.
You arrive in Intuition, where participants discover new insights or develop a more holistic understanding of their situation. This is where the surprising ideas emerge — the ones nobody could have analytically deduced from the data.
You return to Thought — but now it's a different kind of thought. Where you started with a framework for understanding, you return with a framework for action. Where the first framework provided value by including all relevant information, the second provides value by excluding everything but the most critical steps to take.
A framework for understanding and a framework for action both live in the room of Thought. But the two stops are very different. And you can only get from one to the other by walking through the whole house.
The Test for Your Next Plan
Ask yourself: did our strategic planning process ever leave the room of Thought? Did we ever engage with what people are actually feeling? Did we create conditions for genuine creative insight, or did we just analyze our way to conclusions?
If the answer is that you stayed in Thought the whole time, you may have a perfectly logical plan. But you probably don't have one that people will fight for.
Want a strategic planning process that engages your team's full intelligence? Schedule a free call to learn more about the Whole Mind approach.