Coaching practices for Absurd Idea Creativity Method

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Absurd Idea Creativity Method, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• Everything I let myself put down is safe and sensible
• Every idea I come up with, I shoot down as unrealistic before it can go anywhere, so I never escape the sensible little box
• I sit down expecting something original to just arrive out of nowhere, and when the blank page stays blank I decide I’m not creative
• Every idea I generate for this is the obvious one, the one anyone in my field would land on, and none of it feels fresh
• Even after all this work I notice I’m gravitating right back to the safe, familiar combinations and skipping the strange ones

Practices that may help

1. Welcome wild and outrageous ideas
   Explicitly invite the absurd — it’s easier to tame a wild idea than to enliven a dull one.
   Osborn’s Brainstorming Rules, Made Practical
2. Provocation (PO): make a deliberately absurd statement to escape the pattern
   Prefix an impossible or absurd idea with "PO" to signal it is a provocation, not a proposal — then follow it to see what it unlocks.
   Lateral Thinking, Made Practical
3. Steal, steal, then remix
   Collect the best examples you can find, then combine and mutate them into something new.
   Quantity Over Quality: How More Drafts Produce Better Work
4. Treat creativity as combination
   Make new work by joining two existing things that haven’t been joined before.
   Steal Like an Artist, in Practice
5. Deliberately explore the most unlikely combinations
   The combinations intuition skips are precisely the ones the method is designed to find.
   Morphological Analysis, Made Practical
6. Collect everything that resonates — without editing
   Build a practice of gathering ideas, images, sounds, and fragments without evaluating whether they are "good enough."
   The Creative Act: Rick Rubin’s Approach to Making
7. SCAMPER: A Systematic Creativity Technique
   SCAMPER is a structured brainstorming checklist that prompts you to Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify/Magnify, Put to other uses, Eliminate, and Reverse/Rearrange elements of an existing product, process, or problem. It is a practitioner-derived tool with no randomized trial evidence but a strong theoretical grounding in divergent thinking research — it works by forcing systematic exploration of an idea space that unguided brainstorming leaves partially uncovered.
8. The Three Bs of Creativity: Bed, Bath, and Bus
   The "three Bs" — Bed, Bath, and Bus — name the observation that creative breakthroughs often arrive during unfocused, mind-wandering states rather than at the desk. The underlying mechanism (incubation: unconscious associative processing continues after focused effort stops) has real experimental support. You can deliberately engineer conditions that make these moments more productive.
9. Quantity first: generate the most ideas possible before evaluating any
   The best way to have a good idea is to have many ideas — originality rises with volume, so generate recklessly before selecting.
   The Beginner’s Mind in Creative Practice
10. Combinatorial Creativity, Made Practical
    Arthur Koestler’s bisociation theory holds that creative breakthroughs emerge when two previously unconnected frames of reference collide and suddenly fit — not from blank-slate invention but from unexpected combination. The practical implication is that creative output depends heavily on the breadth and diversity of your input: you can only combine what you have already absorbed.

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