Coaching practices for How to Make Ideas Stick

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

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

• We fill the whiteboard with dozens of ideas, the energy is great
• I come up with three or four decent ideas and then just stop, satisfied, like that’s the whole pool
• I get these half-formed ideas that feel like they could be something, but I either jump on them too early and they fizzle into the obvious, or I lose them entirely
• The first decent idea shows up and I grab it and call it done
• I collect great examples and remember the stories, but in the moment I actually need the idea, none of them come to mind

Practices that may help

1. 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
2. Make It Stick: The Science of Learning
   "Make It Stick", by Peter Brown with psychologists Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel, distills decades of cognitive science into a few high-leverage practices: retrieval practice, spacing, interleaving, and elaboration. Its central counterintuitive claim — that the most effective learning feels harder and slower than rereading — is backed by strong experimental evidence.
3. Go for quantity over quality
   Set a raw count target — the goal is many ideas, not good ones.
   Osborn’s Brainstorming Rules, Made Practical
4. Cultivate the slow hunch: let ideas develop over months, not hours
   Resist the urge to act on a half-formed idea; keep it alive in a notebook until adjacent pieces arrive to complete it.
   The Adjacent Possible, Made Practical
5. The obvious veto: reject the first three ideas before keeping any
   Force yourself to generate more by vetoing the first plausible ideas — they are almost always the most obvious ones.
   Deliberate Constraints, Made Practical
6. Label what each example is an example of
   Explicitly tag every example with the concept it illustrates to prevent "inert knowledge."
   Concrete Examples: How to Make Abstract Ideas Stick
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. Use spaced repetition of core ideas in teaching and coaching
   Revisiting key concepts across sessions builds fluent understanding — mere exposure amplifies spaced practice.
   The Mere Exposure Effect, Made Practical
9. Maximize quantity of ideas before evaluating
   Set an explicit quantity target — generate at least 20 ideas before reviewing any of them.
   The Medici Effect: Innovation at the Intersection
10. Go for quantity first
    Aim for a high number of ideas; the best ones tend to come later in the list.
    Divergent Thinking: Generating Many Ideas

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