Define Ideate: 10 Evidence-Based Coaching Practices

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

Practices that may help

1. Ideate — generate options before judging
   Produce many candidate solutions, deferring evaluation until you have quantity.
   Design Thinking, Step by Step
2. Defer all judgment during ideation
   Separate the generating phase from the evaluating phase — they cannot run simultaneously without killing output.
   Creative Confidence, Made Practical
3. Prototype — make it cheap and real
   Build the roughest possible version that lets you learn something specific.
   Design Thinking, Step by Step
4. Build on others’ ideas with "Yes, and…"
   Make every idea in a group session a platform to build from, not a proposal to assess.
   Creative Confidence, Made Practical
5. Make the third alternative tangible with a prototype or model
   Turn an abstract third-alternative idea into something both parties can react to together.
   The Third Alternative, Made Practical
6. 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
7. Capture ideas the moment they surface
   Incubation insights are fragile — they must be captured within seconds or they’re gone.
   The Three Bs of Creativity: Bed, Bath, and Bus
8. Defer judgment during generation
   Generate ideas with no criticism, then evaluate in a separate pass.
   Divergent Thinking: Generating Many Ideas
9. Defer judgment during ideation
   Separate generating ideas from evaluating them — criticism comes later, never during.
   Osborn’s Brainstorming Rules, Made Practical
10. 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

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

• I grab the first idea that pops up and start poking holes in it immediately, so I never get more than two or three options on the table→
• 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.→
• The idea lives perfectly in my head so I keep refining it there and trusting it more and more, but it’s never once touched reality→
• In our brainstorms someone floats something and the instinct in the room→
• We shook hands on the idea feeling great, then a week later it fell apart because it turned out each of us had pictured something completely different→

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