Revealing Unknown Unknowns: How to Use ChatGPT as a Strategic Mirror

Most people use ChatGPT to answer questions – but the real breakthrough comes when you use it to ask the ones you are not thinking to ask. This session, led by Anders Reagan (a Lead Business Technologist at the AI and ML Competency Centre), explores how to turn ChatGPT into a powerful tool for surfacing blind spots, forgotten commitments, unspoken tensions, and high-impact opportunities hiding in plain sight. By configuring custom instructions, enabling memory, and loading it with rich institutional context—meeting transcripts, project docs, scattered notes – you can prompt the model to elevate patterns, contradictions, and insights you and your team may be overlooking. We will dive into techniques for using ChatGPT to conduct pre- and post-mortems, detect strategic drift, trace recurring themes across months of discussion, and surface priorities that have quietly fallen through the cracks. This is about using AI not to replace thinking, but to deepen it.

The event will start with tea, coffee and biscuits from 5pm, followed by the talk from 5.30.

About Anders

Anders Reagan is a Lead Business Technologist at the AI and ML Competency Centre, with a strong academic foundation in human rights and peace studies, holding degrees from Uppsala University and the UN-Mandated University for Peace. Prior to joining Oxford, he worked at the Stockholm School of Economics’ (SSE) House of Innovation, where he played a pivotal role in translating cutting-edge innovation and AI research into actionable insights for business and society. With specialized AI training from Impact Academy, Anders has lectured at SSE and international conferences on the latest applications of generative AI across research, education, and administration. He is particularly focused on integrating AI into higher education, aiming to advance strategic thinking, enhance communication, and improve the scope and quality of creative thinking.