Coaching practices for Lateral Opportunity

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

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

• I’m stuck and every realistic option I can reach from here is no good, and I sense the workable answer is somewhere I just can’t get to from inside the feasible
• I’m staring at this problem convinced I need some whole new skill I don’t have, when I have a hunch something I already do well in another part of my life could quietly solve most of it if I just turned it sideways.
• My boss took a real chance on me and advocated for me, and I just took it and moved on without ever closing the loop
• I’m about to pour a year into learning something, and I keep second-guessing whether I’m betting everything on one narrow outcome or building something that would still pay off no matter which way the future breaks.
• There’s a chance in front of me where the worst case is small and survivable

Practices that may help

1. Lateral Thinking, Made Practical
   Lateral thinking, coined by Edward de Bono, is a set of deliberate techniques for disrupting habitual thought patterns so that a problem can be approached from an unexpected angle. Unlike vertical (logical) thinking, which deepens the current line of reasoning, lateral thinking deliberately abandons it to find a new entry point. Evidence for specific techniques is largely observational and practitioner-reported; the underlying cognitive principle — that breaking pattern-lock enables novel solutions — has support in creativity research.
2. Use a stepping-stone idea: an intermediate impossible idea
   Generate a deliberately impractical intermediate idea to use as a bridge to a practical one you could not have reached directly.
   Lateral Thinking, Made Practical
3. Exaptation: look for how a tool or skill in one context could serve a different one
   Ask of any existing skill, tool, or process you already use: "What else could this do that it was not designed for?"
   The Adjacent Possible, Made Practical
4. The Adjacent Possible, Made Practical
   The adjacent possible, a concept from complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman and popularized by Steven Johnson in Where Good Ideas Come From, describes the set of next steps that are accessible from where you currently stand — not all future possibilities, only those one move away. In practice, it reframes innovation and personal development as disciplined boundary-expansion rather than heroic leaps: each new position opens a new adjacent possible that was not reachable before.
5. Reciprocate when your leader invests in you
   When a leader gives you trust, opportunity, or advocacy, close the loop with visible follow-through.
   Leader-Member Exchange (LMX), Made Practical
6. Opportunity Cost Thinking: What You Give Up When You Choose
   Opportunity cost is the value of the best alternative you forgo when you make a choice — the hidden price of every decision. Economics treats it as a fundamental concept; behavioral research confirms that people routinely ignore it, leading to predictable patterns of wasted resources. Making opportunity cost explicit is one of the highest-leverage thinking habits you can develop.
7. Platform thinking: build capabilities that enable many futures rather than optimizing for one
   Invest in skills, tools, and relationships that expand your adjacent possible in multiple directions rather than optimizing for a single outcome.
   The Adjacent Possible, Made Practical
8. Look for decisions with asymmetric upside — large potential gain, small defined loss
   Seek situations where the worst case is bounded and small while the best case is large and open-ended.
   Expected Value Thinking: Deciding Under Uncertainty
9. 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
10. Design for serendipitous encounters
    Put yourself in environments where unexpected, cross-cluster contact is structurally likely.
    The Strength of Weak Ties

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