Coaching practices for Broaden and Build at Work

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

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

• My brief is so broad — "make it better," "help everyone" — that the possibilities feel infinite and I keep landing on bland, generic answers, because the problem is too big and vague for any specific, alive solution to come into focus.
• Every hour of my life is justified by output now, and the second I do something just for the fun of it a voice says I should be working
• Everything has gone flat and routine
• We keep piling new initiatives on top of old ones we’ve outgrown but never stopped, so the team is overloaded and there’s no room to start anything fresh
• I’m about to pour a year into learning something, and I keep second-guessing whether I’m betting everything on one narrow outcome or building something that would still pay off no matter which way the future breaks.

Practices that may help

1. Broaden-and-Build, Made Practical
   Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory proposes that positive emotions — joy, curiosity, love, gratitude, awe — temporarily broaden thought-action repertoires (making thinking more flexible and creative) and, over time, build durable psychological resources including resilience, social connection, and cognitive flexibility. The theory is supported by experimental evidence for the broadening effect; the longer-term building effects are primarily observational.
2. Narrow the scope: a smaller problem space is a richer one
   Restrict the problem to a specific user, use case, or scenario — the narrower the brief, the richer the possible solutions within it.
   Deliberate Constraints, Made Practical
3. Protect play and creativity as broadening-state generators
   Play is not time away from serious work — it is the state in which the broadened thinking that solves serious problems is most available.
   Broaden-and-Build, Made Practical
4. Cultivate curiosity as a daily emotional practice
   Curiosity is a broadening emotion that expands attentional scope and drives exploratory behavior — it can be deliberately triggered.
   Broaden-and-Build, Made Practical
5. Use Start-Stop-Keep reviews to drive continuous improvement
   Regularly ask what the team should start, stop, and keep doing — and act on the answers.
   The Rockefeller Habits: Scaling Up with Rhythm and Focus
6. Platform thinking: build capabilities that enable many futures rather than optimizing for one
   Invest in skills, tools, and relationships that expand your adjacent possible in multiple directions rather than optimizing for a single outcome.
   The Adjacent Possible, Made Practical
7. Expand the circle deliberately, not aspirationally
   Grow your circle through deep study and feedback, not by simply believing you are competent.
   Circle of Competence
8. Protect the advantages of small — resist headcount as a measure of success
   Adding people to a team adds communication overhead faster than it adds output — protect the productivity of small.
   Designing a Calm Company (Fried & Hansson)
9. Building Positive Emotions, Made Practical
   Positive emotions can be cultivated deliberately through practices that vary what triggers them: gratitude, savoring, meaningful engagement, kindness, and awe are the most studied routes. Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory proposes that positive emotions expand thinking and build psychological resources over time — supported by observational research, though some specific claims (like the 3:1 ratio) have not replicated. The individual practices have varying but mostly real evidence bases.
10. Build a team whose combined strengths cover all four domains
    Hire and assemble deliberately for domain coverage, not for people who think like you.
    Strengths-Based Leadership, Made Practical

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