Coaching practices for How to Use Others Ideas
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For How to Use Others Ideas, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- Every approach I come up with sounds like me, because I keep ruling out anything that doesn’t feel like something I’d do
- I treat every idea on my list as its own separate thing, judging each one solo, and it never occurs to me to mash two of them together
- The instant a workable idea surfaces I grab it and we stop looking
- I’m straining to invent something brand new when I have a graveyard of half-finished ideas I abandoned years ago
- Every idea I generate for this is the obvious one, the one anyone in my field would land on, and none of it feels fresh
Practices that may help
- Ask what a specific other person would do
Step into a named other’s perspective to access approaches you would not generate as yourself.
Oblique Strategies, Made Practical - 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 - Generate Options — explore the full range of possibilities before committing
Invite the person to generate as many options as possible before evaluating any of them.
The GROW Model: Coaching Conversations That Actually Move People - Repeat, loop, or return to an old idea deliberately
"Use an old idea" — something already in your history may work now that it could not before.
Oblique Strategies, Made Practical - Treat creativity as combination
Make new work by joining two existing things that haven’t been joined before.
Steal Like an Artist, in Practice - Reason up from the parts, not by analogy
Build the solution from the fundamentals you kept, rather than copying an existing template.
First-Principles Thinking, Made Usable - Defer judgment during generation
Generate ideas with no criticism, then evaluate in a separate pass.
Divergent Thinking: Generating Many Ideas - Put to other uses
Ask: who else could use this, and what problems could it solve if applied somewhere entirely different?
SCAMPER: A Systematic Creativity Technique - 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 - 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
Related concerns
- Is It Appropriate That My Boss Patented My Idea
Determine whether your problem is already solved elsewhere before investing in original invention.
Calibrate whether the problem requires invention or just search
- Select The Best Idea
Aim for a high number of ideas; the best ones tend to come later in the list.
Go for quantity first
- When Oblique Strategies Ask What Would Someone Else Do
Step into a named other’s perspective to access approaches you would not generate as yourself.
Ask what a specific other person would do
- When The Medici Effect Low Cost Experimentation
Test cross-domain ideas quickly and cheaply before investing in them fully.
Run low-cost experiments on intersectional ideas
- Altshuller Inventive Principles
Determine whether your problem is already solved elsewhere before investing in original invention.
- Brainstorming Options Coaching
Brainstorm all possible paths before judging — then the coachee, not the coach, narrows them.
Generate Options before evaluating any
Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.