Most of us have to switch between left-brained activities and right-brained creative thinking.

Planning, operations, execution, sales are primarily left-brained.
Product strategy, defining positioning, building storylines for investment decks etc. are examples of - at least partly - right-brained activities.

The trouble with right-brain activities is that:
a) They should take no more than 5% of a startup's time; yet
b) They are "multiplier" activities i.e. every decision impacts the company's entire operation by an 'x'. Could be 1.01x, or 1.5x or 10x. A genius decision can 10x the impact (and in some cases, business value) in a short time.

The issue is: Teams get in the meeting room to brainstorm on critical decisions, have very little time to decide on way forward, but come back tired and frustrated having generated ideas but none that seemed to make sense. No genial ideas. Sometimes not even moderately good ones.

Thankfully, the answer is simple. Take the pressure off yourself/your team. Genius isn't "within". Genius is, in reality, a colleague, and a particularly irregular one at that. Some days Genius doesn't show up, other days Genius does.

The secret is for you to show up for 5% of your time, everyday. And hope genius shows up. Some days it does. That's all it takes. Just show up. Or as one would say on social media:

#ShowUp