Last week, my husband and I visited our friend EW to celebrate his new home. As tends to happen at these gatherings, the adults settled upstairs while the children disappeared into the playroom. The evening hummed along until our godson’s laughter cut right through our conversation. His full-bellied, uninhibited laughter captured our attention just as my godson called out for his father to come downstairs. EW re-emerged from checking on the children with a wide smile. “They built a ramp,” EW said. The adults leaned in, curious. “An entire ramp?” I asked. “Yes,” he said, “and they’re still adding to it.”I marveled at the audacity of their imagination — just pure, unencumbered imagination and a ramp.
Children don’t experience problems as barriers; they experience them as invitations. Yet somewhere between childhood and adulthood, the accumulation of heartbreak, failure, bureaucracy, and consequence begins to quietly crowd out that instinct. At Fenton, our work as strategists is to help clients solve some of the most urgent problems of our time — protecting voting rights, advancing climate action, ensuring reproductive autonomy, fighting for equity and access to quality education. These challenges demand boldness, but often when clients come to us, their thinking is already constrained: by budgets, by board directives, by the very real fear of getting it wrong. The weight of consequence has replaced the courage of imagination. Reclaiming that child-like sense of limitless possibility is essential to seeing our way through the problems that challenge our ability to progress as a society.
Start with the absurd, then work backward.
Innovation rarely begins with a realistic plan. It begins with a question that sounds almost too big: What if we could reach every eligible voter before the next election cycle? What if climate action actually felt like an opportunity instead of a sacrifice? Strategic thinking gets sharper when it starts unbound. When working with clients, we encourage them to articulate their most expansive vision first — without a budget line in sight — and then engineer backward toward what’s achievable. The ramp gets built one cushion at a time.
Invite the unexpected voices into the room.
Our godson didn’t build that ramp alone. The magic was in the collaboration. A room full of children who hadn’t yet learned to defer to each other’s assumed expertise was able to make something out of nothing. In practice, this means bringing stakeholders into strategy sessions who wouldn’t typically have a seat at the table: the communications coordinator, the community member, the skeptic. Diverse cognitive inputs break the gravitational pull of how it’s always been done.
Use emerging technology as a thinking partner, not just a tool
You’ve heard it repeated ad nauseam — artificial intelligence is reshaping how organizations can prototype, test, and communicate ideas. Rather than seeing AI as an opponent, we’re finding ways to use LLMs to make our work more impactful for clients. This looks like optimizing our research and development framework, drafting audience personas at scale, and stress-testing messages across demographics in real time. The technology doesn’t replace the strategist; it removes the ceiling on how many possibilities we can explore before committing to one.
Protect the ideation phase
Under pressure, organizations skip straight from problem to execution. The messy middle — where ideas are half-formed, contradictory, and unpolished — is where the best thinking lives. Build in explicit time for divergent thinking before convergence.
Normalize the pivot
Children don’t mourn the cushion that didn’t work; they find new ways to manifest their imaginative ideas. For organizations doing urgent, meaningful work, the fear of changing course can feel like failure. Reframing iteration as intelligence — not inconsistency — is one of the most liberating shifts we help clients make.
My godson and his friends’ ramp was structurally improbable and entirely glorious. Those bold and hilarious children weren’t in the playroom asking whether the budget had been approved. They weren’t worried about a reporting chain or if their messaging was 100% right. They were just building what felt intuitive and necessary for the moment. They stepped into their curiosity. That’s the posture Fenton brings to every client engagement: seasoned strategic expertise paired with the audacity to imagine that something genuinely new is possible because of the issues our clients are fighting for; incremental change won’t be enough.