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ArticleMay 12, 2026

How Coaches Can Use AI as a Strategic Thinking Partner

The most effective prompt for strategic decisions isn't 'What should I do?' It's 'What other options should I be evaluating?'

Most coaches are already using AI for the easy stuff. Summarizing notes. Cleaning up emails. Drafting a bio, an intake form, a session summary. All of that is fine. None of it is what I find most interesting.

The more interesting use is as a thinking partner when you're stuck on a real decision.

Coaches make a lot of decisions in relative isolation. How to position their practice. Whether to change an offer or a program structure. How to respond to a recurring pattern with a client that isn't resolving. How to spend limited development time. Where to focus next. In an ideal world, those questions go to a trusted peer, a supervisor, a mentor. But time is short, access to good thinking partners isn't always there, and the decisions don't wait.

This is where AI earns its keep. But not in the way most people reach for it.

The instinct is to ask: "What should I do?" That's the wrong starting question. Not because AI can't generate an answer, but because most of us narrow our options too early, long before we've actually mapped the decision we're facing. Asking for a recommendation before you've mapped your options means you're optimizing within a frame that may already be too small.

Daniel Kahneman, whose work on judgment and decision-making is foundational across behavioral economics and organizational psychology, calls this narrow framing: the tendency to treat decisions as isolated binary choices rather than as part of a broader option space. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, he argues that broad framing, consciously expanding the set of options before narrowing, consistently produces better decisions. But it doesn't happen naturally. It has to be deliberately triggered.

Research on cognitive bias in professional decision-making identifies a related pattern called premature closure: the tendency to stop considering alternatives once a workable option is identified. Studies of clinical reasoning find that premature closure is one of the most common sources of diagnostic error, precisely because once a working answer is in place, the motivation to explore further drops off sharply. The same dynamic shows up in strategic decisions. We identify two or three paths, evaluate among them, and treat the decision as the choice between those options, not as the question of whether we've found the right options to begin with.

Research published in Scientific Reports on cognitive set bias found that breaking out of a familiar strategy requires more than simply recognizing that an alternative might exist. It requires deliberately generating alternatives before committing to a path. That's the intervention. Not more analysis of existing options, but expanding the option set before analysis begins.

This is where AI is genuinely useful.

The most effective prompt I've found for strategic decisions isn't "What should I do?" It's "What other options should I be evaluating?"

Here's how to use it:

I want you to act as my strategic advisor, helping me make a decision as a [ROLE, e.g., coach, program director, faculty coach].

I'm trying to decide: [explain the decision].

The outcome I want is: [explain what success looks like].

Here are the options I've identified so far:

  • [Option 1]
  • [Option 2]
  • [Option 3]

What other options should I be evaluating? List additional options I haven't identified, with the tradeoffs of each.

What this does is change the task from "help me choose" to "help me see what I'm missing." That's a different cognitive operation, and it's the one that actually addresses narrow framing.

A good thinking partner doesn't hand you the answer. They help you see the shape of the decision more clearly before you start narrowing. They surface assumptions you've been treating as fixed. They name options you've been leaving off the table without realizing it. They force a wider frame.

AI, used this way, does the same thing. It's not a replacement for judgment, and it shouldn't be treated as one. The goal isn't to outsource the decision. The goal is to improve the quality of your thinking before you make one.

That starts by resisting the instinct to narrow too soon.

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