Coaching practices for Creative Process Phases
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Creative Process Phases, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I keep dragging the big-picture dreamers into the tedious finishing work and asking my finishers to brainstorm wild ideas, and everyone’s miserable and the handoffs are a mess
- Every new project I start from a blank page as if I’ve never done anything like it, even though I’ve solved half of it before
- 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.
- Every time I try to brainstorm, the critic and the dreamer are talking over each other
- I’m sitting on a big messy pile of ideas and now I’m just frozen
Practices that may help
- Assign project phases to genius-matched people
Route early ideation to Wonder/Invention geniuses and execution phases to Tenacity geniuses.
The 6 Types of Working Genius (Patrick Lencioni) - Express work in reusable intermediate packets
Break your creative output into small, reusable units — outlines, summaries, frameworks — that can be combined and repurposed.
Building a Second Brain (BASB), 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 - 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 - Balance divergent with convergent thinking
Treat creativity as two phases — open up to generate, then close down to select.
Divergent Thinking: Generating Many Ideas - Iterate — treat the stages as a loop, not a line
Cycle back to earlier stages as testing reveals you framed the wrong problem.
Design Thinking, Step by Step - Abandon the work for a defined period and return fresh
Structured incubation — not avoidance — is an active creative tool.
Oblique Strategies, Made Practical - Bias toward action over deliberation
Ship a rough version fast to learn what the problem actually is rather than theorizing indefinitely.
Creative Confidence, Made Practical - Use low-demand movement as incubation time
Walking, showering, or doing dishes — rhythmic, low-demand activities free up associative thinking.
The Three Bs of Creativity: Bed, Bath, and Bus - Design Thinking, Step by Step
Design thinking is a five-stage problem-solving framework — empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test — popularized by IDEO and the Stanford d.school. It is a process model, not a tested intervention: its value comes from forcing you to understand the user before you commit to a solution, and to learn cheaply through prototypes instead of expensive bets.
Related concerns
- Creative Process Stages
Break your creative output into small, reusable units — outlines, summaries, frameworks — that can be combined and repurposed.
Express work in reusable intermediate packets
- Design Thinking Step By Step In A New Job
Design thinking is a five-stage problem-solving framework — empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test — popularized by IDEO and the Stanford d.school. It is a process model, not a tested intervention: its value comes from forcing you to understand the user before you commit to a solution, and to learn cheaply through prototypes instead of expensive bets.
- Design Thinking Step By Step When Burned Out
Cycle back to earlier stages as testing reveals you framed the wrong problem.
Iterate — treat the stages as a loop, not a line
- Idea Generation Phase
Produce many candidate solutions, deferring evaluation until you have quantity.
Ideate — generate options before judging
- Systematic Creative Iteration
Alter a single variable at a time to see how the rest of the system responds.
Change exactly one element and observe what shifts
- Creative Before Reactive
Do generative (creating) work before reactive (responding) work — never the other way around.
Sequence creative tasks before reactive tasks each day
Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.