Templates
About these templates
Thinking work splits into two modes, and the mistake most teams make is running them at the same time. First you need volume, without judgement. Then you need structure, with plenty of judgement. These templates support one mode or the other, so it helps to know which you are in.
For generating material, brainwriting is deliberately silent: everyone writes before anyone speaks, which stops the first confident voice from anchoring the room. A lotus diagram pushes for depth instead of breadth, taking eight themes and forcing eight ideas out of each, and the later cells are usually where the unobvious ideas appear. An affinity map is for what comes next, when you have a pile of loose notes and need to group them into themes without deciding the themes in advance.
For making sense of material, a concept map is the most flexible, because labelling the links between ideas forces you to say exactly how they relate rather than just placing them near each other. Cause and effect analysis works backwards from a problem through its contributing causes, which is the fastest way to stop a team from fixing the symptom. A decision tree lays out branching choices and where each one leads, and it is worth building whenever a decision keeps getting relitigated.
A retrospective is the structured version of all of this applied to your own work: what to start, stop and continue, ending in actions somebody owns.
None of these need to be neat. They are working documents, and the point is the thinking they provoke rather than the artefact you end up with.