Why pharma workshops keep producing the same ideas

Run a strategy workshop with a pharma brand team and you'll recognise the output. Patient education initiative. Digital HCP hub. KOL advocacy programme. Congress presence refresh. Rep training. A cross-functional steering committee.

These aren't bad ideas. They're just the same ideas. The ones that show up in almost every workshop, regardless of therapy area, regardless of market, regardless of the specific problem the team was trying to solve.

Why this happens

Three structural reasons, in order of difficulty to fix.

1. The brief is too broad

"How do we grow market share?" is not a workshop question. It's a strategy question, and it's too large for a day's work. A workshop brief needs to be narrow enough that the room can actually solve it. "What is stopping a primary care physician from initiating therapy in the first six weeks after diagnosis?" is a workshop question. The first gives you generic outputs; the second forces specific ones.

2. The room is too polite

Most pharma workshops are cross-functional by design. The cost is that nobody wants to challenge commercial in front of medical, or medical in front of regulatory. Disagreement gets smoothed into consensus, and consensus gravitates to the middle. The middle is where familiar ideas live.

The fix isn't to invite conflict for its own sake. It's to create a structure where disagreement is visible before it's resolved. A "strongest objection" exercise, done in writing, before any group discussion, tends to do the job.

3. The divergent phase is too short

Most workshops spend 20% of the time generating ideas and 80% evaluating them. The familiar ideas survive evaluation because they feel safe. The unfamiliar ones die because the evaluator doesn't know how to score them.

Flip this. Spend longer in divergence. Use structured prompts that force the team out of the obvious answer ("what would a retailer do here?" "what would we do if budget were halved?" "what would we do if the product didn't exist?"). Evaluate fewer ideas, more carefully.

What good looks like

A workshop that produces three or four specific, testable, mildly uncomfortable ideas is more valuable than a workshop that produces fifteen familiar ones. The measure isn't the number of post-its on the wall at the end. It's whether the team leaves with an experiment they couldn't have designed before walking in.

If the output of your last strategy workshop could have been written on a napkin the day before, the workshop was about alignment, not strategy. Both are useful. They're not the same thing.

Behavioural design workshops