By far the most commonly used conceptual tool used by strategists (so common we have forgotten it is just a tool) is the humble brief.

Before a brief has been given to anyone it will already have performed a single critical job. It moved knowledge from the tacit to the explicit.  Turning something into written language crystallizes it in a way that little else does. In a strange way it actually creates it. Why? Because it forces you to organise your thoughts and to reduce ambiguity. While you are just talking about ideas ambiguity is a lot harder to pin down. Write it down and it becomes obvious if you haven't thought through what you are trying to do and if it is coherent. 

That's why you should always get a client to write a brief - because when they articulate exactly what they want in writing, it forces them to become explicit. They have to organise their thinking.

At the end of a project all that tacit learning needs to be captured - again in writing. That's why we have contact or call reports. In research this is the importance of the stages of analysis and reporting. If you don't write down what you have learned from the fieldwork- then the result literally disappears - you won't remember any of it within a matter of days. Once you have read a document or been debriefed as the presenter tells the story of the debrief, then the knowledge is arranged in a way that helps you to retain it. 

So don't look on writing as a piece of unavoidable bureacracy. But an essential part of creating knowledge. The graphic comes from a great book called the knowledge creating company - which I am sure I will have cause to mention again. You can buy it from my bookshop on the accountplanning.net website where there are a host of other titles you may find useful each of which I have read and reviewed.