Coaching practices for Adjacent Possible Mapping

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

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

• I keep planning by staring at the huge faraway goal and feeling stuck, when what I actually need is to look at what I already have right now and ask what that makes possible this week.
• I’m staring at this problem convinced I need some whole new skill I don’t have, when I have a hunch something I already do well in another part of my life could quietly solve most of it if I just turned it sideways.
• Every reason I come up with points the same way, and that smoothness is starting to make me suspicious
• Everyone I talk to does basically what I do and reads what I read, so my ideas just keep recycling the same stuff
• I’ve got all these ideas sitting on separate branches and I can feel that some of them are secretly connected across the map

Practices that may help

1. The Adjacent Possible, Made Practical
   The adjacent possible, a concept from complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman and popularized by Steven Johnson in Where Good Ideas Come From, describes the set of next steps that are accessible from where you currently stand — not all future possibilities, only those one move away. In practice, it reframes innovation and personal development as disciplined boundary-expansion rather than heroic leaps: each new position opens a new adjacent possible that was not reachable before.
2. Map your current edge: what is one step away from where you are?
   List everything that is genuinely accessible from your current skills, relationships, and resources — your adjacent possible is defined by what you already have.
   The Adjacent Possible, Made Practical
3. Exaptation: look for how a tool or skill in one context could serve a different one
   Ask of any existing skill, tool, or process you already use: "What else could this do that it was not designed for?"
   The Adjacent Possible, Made Practical
4. Argument Mapping
   Argument mapping is the practice of drawing the logical structure of an argument as a diagram — claims, supporting reasons, objections, and rebuttals made spatially explicit. Developed into a pedagogical system by Tim van Gelder, it is one of the few critical-thinking interventions with controlled-study support: students who learned argument mapping showed significantly larger gains in reasoning ability than those in conventional classes.
5. Add the strongest objection to every major supporting reason
   For each supporting reason, find the best counter and put it on the map.
   Argument Mapping
6. Build a liquid network: expose yourself to people at the edge of different fields
   Seek out conversations and environments where ideas from adjacent fields are in the air — most good ideas are collisions, not inventions.
   The Adjacent Possible, Made Practical
7. Add cross-links between branches to capture unexpected connections
   Draw connecting lines between ideas on different branches when you notice a relationship that the radial structure doesn’t capture.
   Mind Mapping: Visual Thinking for Learning and Creativity
8. Map interests for both sides before generating solutions
   Write down both parties’ known and inferred interests before proposing anything — the map reveals trades that no single position could.
   Interests vs. Positions: The Core of Integrative Negotiation
9. Build the morphological box (Zwicky box)
   Map all possible values for each dimension to create the complete solution landscape.
   Morphological Analysis, Made Practical
10. Red-team joint scenarios before betting on them
    Before acting on a conjunction ("X will happen AND Y will follow"), assign a skeptic to attack the "and."
    The Conjunction Fallacy — When "More Details" Feels More Likely

Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.