Coaching practices for Ideas From Other Fields

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

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

• Everything I come up with is the same kind of answer everyone in my field would give
• I only ever read and learn inside my own specialty, and my ideas have started to feel inbred and predictable
• I’m stuck on a problem because the way I’ve described it boxes in the solutions I can even see
• Everyone I talk to does basically what I do and reads what I read, so my ideas just keep recycling the same stuff
• Almost everyone I talk to does roughly what I do, so we just keep recycling the same ideas back at each other

Practices that may help

1. Cross-pollinate from distant domains
   Pull ideas and analogies from fields unrelated to your problem.
   Divergent Thinking: Generating Many Ideas
2. 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
3. Reframe problems using cross-domain language
   Describe your problem in a different field’s vocabulary — then use that vocabulary to search for solutions.
   The Medici Effect: Innovation at the Intersection
4. Build a liquid network: expose yourself to people at the edge of different fields
   Seek out conversations and environments where ideas from adjacent fields are in the air — most good ideas are collisions, not inventions.
   The Adjacent Possible, Made Practical
5. 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
6. Build a deliberately broad input diet
   Expose yourself to domains far outside your expertise to stock the combinatorial engine.
   Combinatorial Creativity, Made Practical
7. Import a frame from a different domain
   Describe your problem as if it were a challenge in an unrelated field, then steal the solutions from that field.
   Problem Reframing: Solving the Right Problem First
8. 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
9. Collect models deliberately from fields outside your specialty
   Choose one model per quarter from a discipline you do not work in and learn it well enough to explain it.
   Mental Models: Charlie Munger’s Latticework Approach
10. Ask "what else is this like?" to find the hidden frame
    Identify the deeper structure of your problem and look for problems with the same structure in different domains.
    Combinatorial Creativity, Made Practical

Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.