Coaching practices for Brainstorm Before Evaluate
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Brainstorm Before Evaluate, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- Every time I try to brainstorm, the critic and the dreamer are talking over each other
- An idea barely forms in my head before I’ve already torn it apart
- The moment an idea forms, this critic in my head pounces and kills it before I’ve even written it down, so I end up staring at a blank page with nothing because nothing was ever allowed to survive long enough to grow.
- We fill the whiteboard with dozens of ideas, the energy is great
- I’ve got maybe two ideas for what to do about this and both feel hopeless, so I shoot every other thought down before I even finish it
Practices that may help
- Separate divergence from convergence sessions
Keep idea generation and idea selection in separate sittings — never mix the modes.
Quantity Over Quality: How More Drafts Produce Better Work - Defer judgment during ideation
Separate generating ideas from evaluating them — criticism comes later, never during.
Osborn’s Brainstorming Rules, Made Practical - Defer all judgment during ideation
Separate the generating phase from the evaluating phase — they cannot run simultaneously without killing output.
Creative Confidence, Made Practical - Harvest and cluster ideas after the session
The generation phase is worthless without a systematic harvest: sort, name, and prioritize the output.
Osborn’s Brainstorming Rules, Made Practical - Generate solutions without premature evaluation
List as many potential solutions as possible before judging any of them.
Problem-Solving Therapy, Made Practical - Ideate — generate options before judging
Produce many candidate solutions, deferring evaluation until you have quantity.
Design Thinking, Step by Step - Combine and build on others’ ideas
Treat every idea as a building block — the best ideas in a session are usually hybrids.
Osborn’s Brainstorming Rules, Made Practical - Reverse brainstorm: solve the opposite problem first
Ask "How would we guarantee the worst possible outcome?" — then invert every answer.
Lateral Thinking, Made Practical - Green hat: generate new ideas and creative possibilities
The green hat is for generating alternatives and possibilities without evaluation — quantity and novelty over quality and correctness.
Six Thinking Hats, Made Practical - Generate Options before evaluating any
Brainstorm all possible paths before judging — then the coachee, not the coach, narrows them.
The GROW Coaching Model, Made Practical
Related concerns
- Defer Judgment Brainstorming
Separate generating ideas from evaluating them — criticism comes later, never during.
Defer judgment during ideation
- Deferred Judgment Brainstorming
Separate generating ideas from evaluating them — criticism comes later, never during.
- Separate Idea Generation From Evaluation
Generate ideas with no criticism, then evaluate in a separate pass.
Defer judgment during generation
- Brainstorming Without Criticism
Separate generating ideas from evaluating them — criticism comes later, never during.
- Brainstorming Without Judgment
Separate generating ideas from evaluating them — criticism comes later, never during.
- Defer Judgment Ideation
Separate generating ideas from evaluating them — criticism comes later, never during.
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