Helping Leaders Think Clearly When the Stakes Are High
Dr Tobias Adam — Strategic Decision Making · Facilitation · Author
Why I Do This Work
For over a decade, I have worked with decision-makers across business, government, and civil society — people responsible for choices that shape organizations, communities, and sometimes entire regions.
One pattern kept showing up: the disciplines that matter most for strategic decisions — strategic foresight, innovation, and the quality of the decision process itself — were almost always treated in isolation. Strategy teams would build plans without exploring alternative futures. Foresight exercises produced rich scenarios that sat in a drawer. Innovation happened in its own silo. And decision quality was discussed after failures, never before them. The result was predictable: strategic decision making that looked rigorous but failed under complexity.
I became convinced that the problem was not a lack of good tools. It was a lack of integration — a way of connecting these disciplines into a coherent practice, supported by visual reasoning that makes complex thinking shareable and challengeable. That conviction led to this book and to the framework behind it.
Background
My thinking has been shaped by three intersecting threads.
Academic Research
A doctorate in technology and innovation management gave me the analytical foundations — and a healthy skepticism toward frameworks that look elegant on paper but collapse under organizational reality.
Methodological Practice
Years of applied work with Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT) across a wide range of industries and challenge types — from product innovation and service design to organizational restructuring and strategic renewal. What distinguishes my approach is the integration of SIT with complementary frameworks: the Playbook for Digital Transformation, business model design, and process optimization. Rather than applying SIT in isolation, I use it as one lens within a broader reasoning architecture — combining structured creativity with strategic and operational rigor.
The Parmenides Foundation
Extended collaboration with the Parmenides Foundation in Munich, a research institute at the intersection of cognitive science, neuroscience, and strategic reasoning. The Foundation’s work is grounded in a fundamental insight from cognitive and brain research: the human mind relies on only four basic operations to navigate complex challenges. From this foundation, the team developed Parmenides Eidos — a structured visual reasoning environment with dedicated thinking tools designed to work with the brain’s natural cognitive architecture rather than against it.
My collaboration with the Foundation shaped how I approach strategic foresight and complexity at a fundamental level. This includes not only causal loop modeling, but the full architecture of strategic reasoning: designing scenario and option spaces, applying consistency checks across scenario dimensions, evaluating alternatives against multidimensional criteria and objectives, and assessing the robustness of strategic options across multiple futures.
These methods shaped not only the analytical dimension of the Strategic Clarity framework, but its deeper foundation: the discipline of structured thinking, the awareness of which cognitive operations a given challenge requires, and the practice of combining them deliberately — so that complexity becomes not just analyzable, but genuinely navigable.
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How I Work
I do not arrive with a fixed answer. I arrive with a structured process for finding one together. Every engagement starts with a genuine diagnostic of the strategic decision making challenge at hand: What is the actual strategic challenge? Where does the thinking break down? What cognitive or organizational patterns are getting in the way? From there, I design a process that fits the challenge — drawing on strategy, foresight, innovation, and decision quality as the situation demands. The output is not a report. It is a shared understanding, a set of structured choices, and a team that knows how to think about the problem going forward.
What I Offer
Strategy Workshops
Focused sessions to frame challenges, explore options, and align decisions. Half-day to two-day formats.
Strategy Sprints
Intensive 1–6 week engagements for rapid strategic renewal or complex decision design.
Strategic Labs
Extended programs for organizations navigating transformation, policy design, or long-term capability building.
Advisory & Sparring
Ongoing strategic partnership for leaders who want a thinking partner.
Keynotes & Talks
On integrated thinking, cognitive biases in strategy, and building organizations that decide with clarity.
Beyond Strategy
When I am not helping teams untangle complex decisions, you will find me exploring how systems work — whether that means studying geopolitical dynamics, experimenting with AI-assisted reasoning, or simply taking a long walk and letting the dots connect themselves. I believe that the best strategic thinking happens when rigor meets curiosity, structure meets creativity, and diverse perspectives meet a shared visual language.
Let’s Think Together
Whether you are facing a specific strategic challenge or looking for a long-term thinking partner — I’d be happy to explore how I can help.