Exception Exploration: 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 Exception Exploration, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
About 2 minutes
Try it here: list times the problem was smaller
Times when a problem was smaller show what was different. List a few and look for the pattern.
When was the problem smaller, and what was different?
Practices that may help
- Exploration with guardrails
Give the learner latitude to experiment independently while keeping consequences bounded.
Cognitive Apprenticeship: Learning by Making Thinking Visible - Treat failed attempts as constraint-locators rather than dead ends
Each failed approach tells you precisely where the active constraint lives — mine that information before trying again.
Constraint Relaxation: Escaping the Walls You Built Yourself - Exception Finding: When Is the Problem Already Less Severe?
Identify times when the problem was absent or less severe — these are evidence that solutions already exist.
Solution-Focused Brief Therapy: Building On What Works - Treat errors as adjacent-possible expansion events
When something goes wrong, ask what new territory the failure has made visible that success would have hidden.
The Adjacent Possible, Made Practical - Rebuild from fundamentals and stress-test it
Reassemble a solution from verified parts, then attack it to find where it breaks.
First-Principles Thinking, Made Usable - Third-party explanation test
Explain the concept to a person who knows nothing about it and let their questions expose your gaps.
Illusion of Explanatory Depth: You Know Less Than You Think - Designing the Experiment
Plan a real-world activity that will generate clear evidence for or against the belief.
Behavioral Experiments: Testing Beliefs in the Real World - Question what moves and operations are permitted
Challenge the implicit rules about which actions are allowed — often the "forbidden" move is the solution.
Constraint Relaxation: Escaping the Walls You Built Yourself - Write the hypothesis before you act
State what you expect the experiment to reveal before it begins.
Tiny Experiments: Testing Change Without Committing to It - Build branches that are MECE at every level
Ensure each set of branches is mutually exclusive (no overlap) and collectively exhaustive (nothing important missing).
Issue Tree Analysis
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I’ve followed the instructions enough times that I can repeat the steps, but I want to actually wrestle with a real problem myself
- Every time an approach flops I just throw it out and lunge at something totally different, and I keep slamming into the same wall
- It feels like this is just how I am
- Something I tried just flopped and my instinct is to wince and bury it, but part of me suspects the way it went wrong is actually showing me something I’d never have seen if it had simply worked.
- I’ve got this fresh idea I’m genuinely excited about, and that excitement is making me go easy on it
Related concerns
- Attempt Before Instruction
Try to solve a new type of problem with your current knowledge before any formal teaching.
Attempt before instruction
- Completion Problems
Transition from full examples to partial completions to independent problems as competence grows, rather than switching abruptly.
Fade gradually from full examples toward independent problem-solving
- Exception Finding Questions
Before answering a question, ask whether it is the right question and whether it is framed to produce useful answers.
Question the question itself
- Learning Experiments
State what you expect the experiment to reveal before it begins.
Write the hypothesis before you act
- Test Your Purpose
Validate the why by using it as a filter for choices, then refining where it doesn’t fit.
Test your why against real decisions
- Visible Failures Seeking
Look for the people who tried the same thing and didn’t make it through.
Actively seek out the failures you aren’t seeing
Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.