Coaching practices for Diversify Creative Inputs
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Diversify Creative Inputs, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I sit down expecting something original to just arrive out of nowhere, and when the blank page stays blank I decide I’m not creative
- My taste has gotten so refined and narrow that I only ever take in the same approved stuff in my lane, and I’m realizing that diet is exactly why my work has stopped surprising even me
- Almost everyone I talk to does roughly what I do, so we just keep recycling the same ideas back at each other
- I keep coming up dry on new ideas, and I’ve realized I only ever read and follow stuff inside my own field
- Every time I try to brainstorm, the critic and the dreamer are talking over each other
Practices that may help
- Steal, steal, then remix
Collect the best examples you can find, then combine and mutate them into something new.
Quantity Over Quality: How More Drafts Produce Better Work - Diversify creative inputs: consume across domains and outside your taste
Read, watch, listen to work that you do not immediately like — outside-taste input breaks the feedback loop that narrows creative range over time.
The Beginner’s Mind in Creative Practice - Build a diverse network deliberately
Connect with people in different disciplines, cultures, and functions — not primarily with people who do what you do.
The Medici Effect: Innovation at the Intersection - Build a deliberately broad input diet
Expose yourself to domains far outside your expertise to stock the combinatorial engine.
Combinatorial Creativity, 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 - Intentional field-crossing
Regularly study a field entirely outside your domain and ask what it could teach yours.
The Medici Effect: Innovation at the Intersection - Cross-pollinate from distant domains
Pull ideas and analogies from fields unrelated to your problem.
Divergent Thinking: Generating Many Ideas - Use SCAMPER and other prompts to vary ideas
Apply structured prompts (substitute, combine, adapt, modify, etc.) to push ideas in new directions.
Divergent Thinking: Generating Many Ideas - 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 - Quantity first: generate the most ideas possible before evaluating any
The best way to have a good idea is to have many ideas — originality rises with volume, so generate recklessly before selecting.
The Beginner’s Mind in Creative Practice
Related concerns
- Broad Input Creativity
Collect the best examples you can find, then combine and mutate them into something new.
Steal, steal, then remix
- Creative Insight Diverse Inputs
Pull ideas and analogies from fields unrelated to your problem.
Cross-pollinate from distant domains
- When Combinatorial Creativity Build Broad Input Diet
Expose yourself to domains far outside your expertise to stock the combinatorial engine.
Build a deliberately broad input diet
- Creative Range
Step into a named other’s perspective to access approaches you would not generate as yourself.
Ask what a specific other person would do
- Creative Range Expansion
Expose yourself to domains far outside your expertise to stock the combinatorial engine.
- How To Think Outside The Box
Introduce random stimuli — words, objects, images — into your problem-solving sessions and force connections.
Break associative barriers through randomness
Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.