Coaching practices for First Who Then What Collins
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For First Who Then What Collins, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I keep nailing down the exact plan before I’ve sorted out who’s actually in the boat with me, and then the plan shifts and the wrong people can’t adapt
- I’m betting on "this will happen and then that will follow," and the link between them feels airtight to me
- I finally know what I should be focused on, but good opportunities keep landing in my lap and I say yes to all of them
- Someone brings me a problem and I grab their very first sentence and start solving it
- I tend to lock in on a decision the moment the first result looks good and just stop there, and I want to actually keep going
Practices that may help
- Get the right people on the bus before setting direction
Prioritize who is doing the work before deciding what to do.
Level 5 Leadership: Humility and Will in Great Leaders - Red-team joint scenarios before betting on them
Before acting on a conjunction ("X will happen AND Y will follow"), assign a skeptic to attack the "and."
The Conjunction Fallacy — When "More Details" Feels More Likely - Ruthlessly prune commitments outside the intersection
Once the intersection is visible, say no to opportunities — even good ones — that fall outside it.
The Hedgehog Concept - Ask "And what else?"
The first answer is rarely the most important one — "And what else?" pulls out the one that actually matters.
The Coaching Habit: Seven Questions to Be More Coach-Like - Ask “and then what?” three times
Don’t stop at the first consequence — follow the chain at least two steps further.
Second-Order Thinking: And Then What? - Look out the window for credit, in the mirror for blame
When things go well, credit others; when things go wrong, look at yourself first.
Level 5 Leadership: Humility and Will in Great Leaders - Develop successors who will surpass you
Invest in your successor’s success as a deliberate act of institutional ambition.
Level 5 Leadership: Humility and Will in Great Leaders - Find your hedgehog concept — the one thing you can be best at
Identify the intersection of what you can be best at, what drives your economic engine, and what you are deeply passionate about.
Level 5 Leadership: Humility and Will in Great Leaders - If–Then Planning, Made Practical
If–then plans (also called implementation intentions) specify in advance how you will respond to the specific situations that typically derail your goals: "If situation X occurs, then I will do Y." A meta-analysis of 94 studies found a medium-to-large effect on goal attainment — one of the most reliable single techniques in goal-setting research. - Second-Order Thinking: And Then What?
Second-order thinking, a discipline associated with investor Howard Marks, means tracing the consequences of your consequences — asking "and then what?" past the immediate result to the reactions, side effects, and feedback that follow. It is a reasoning heuristic rather than a trial-tested intervention, but it counteracts the well-documented human bias toward judging a choice only by its first, most visible outcome.
Related concerns
- And Then What
Don’t stop at the first consequence — follow the chain at least two steps further.
Ask “and then what?” three times
- Collins Good To Great Leadership
Care more about the organization’s success than your personal legacy.
Channel ambition to the institution, not yourself
- If Then Reasoning
If–then plans (also called implementation intentions) specify in advance how you will respond to the specific situations that typically derail your goals: "If situation X occurs, then I will do Y." A meta-analysis of 94 studies found a medium-to-large effect on goal attainment — one of the most reliable single techniques in goal-setting research.
- Jim Collins Level 5
Jim Collins’ Good to Great research found that the leaders who took companies from good to great shared a paradoxical combination of fierce personal will and deep personal humility — what Collins calls Level 5 Leadership. They channeled ambition into the institution, not themselves, and set up successors for greatness rather than engineering dependence.
- And Then What Technique
The Feynman Technique is a four-step loop: pick a concept, explain it in plain language as if teaching a beginner, notice exactly where the explanation breaks down, and go back to fill those gaps. It works because explaining forces you to generate and retrieve the material, which exposes the difference between recognizing an idea and actually understanding it.
- Collins Brown Newman
Once the intersection is visible, say no to opportunities — even good ones — that fall outside it.
Ruthlessly prune commitments outside the intersection
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