Latticework Technique: 10 Evidence-Based Coaching Practices

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

Practices that may help

1. Mental Models: Charlie Munger’s Latticework Approach
   Charlie Munger argued that clear thinking requires a collection of models from multiple disciplines — a latticework — because any single mental model warps reality by over-predicting the phenomena it explains best. The approach is practitioner philosophy rather than empirically tested method, but it is grounded in real findings about cognitive biases, analogical reasoning, and multi-causal thinking.
2. 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.
3. The Method of Loci: How to Build a Memory Palace
   The method of loci places information you want to remember at specific locations along a familiar mental route. Navigating the route in your mind retrieves the information in order. Memory championship research and cognitive studies confirm the method produces striking recall advantages — but only when the vivid placement step is done properly.
4. Compare two examples side-by-side to extract the underlying principle
   Place two worked examples next to each other and find exactly what is the same, structurally, beneath the surface differences.
   The Worked Examples Effect: Learn Faster by Studying Solutions First
5. Use morphological analysis for wicked problems with many interdependencies
   The method shines on problems too complex for brainstorming to cover adequately.
   Morphological Analysis, Made Practical
6. Zettelkasten: Thinking in a Slip-Box
   The Zettelkasten ("slip-box") is a note-making system, used famously by sociologist Niklas Luhmann and popularized by Sönke Ahrens in "How to Take Smart Notes". You write atomic notes in your own words and link them to each other, so a network of ideas accumulates over time. The system is a practitioner method, but it runs on well-studied mechanisms like elaboration and generation.
7. Substitute abstract terms with concrete stand-ins
   Convert abstract ideas into concrete visual objects before placing them in a palace.
   The Method of Loci: How to Build a Memory Palace
8. Chunk-boundary labeling
   Give each recurring pattern a name so you can manipulate it as a single unit.
   Chunking: How Experts See What Beginners Miss
9. Scaffolding: The Art of Temporary Learning Support
   Scaffolding, a term introduced by Jerome Bruner’s research team to describe Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development in practice, is a set of temporary supports that allow a learner to perform tasks just beyond current ability — with the explicit goal of withdrawing those supports as the learner becomes capable. The evidence across educational settings is strong and consistent.
10. Participate in a community of practice to absorb shared tacit knowledge
    Embed yourself in a group of practitioners — shared tacit knowledge circulates through collaboration and culture, not documentation.
    Tacit Knowledge: The Skill You Can’t Fully Explain

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

• I sense two of these examples are really doing the same thing underneath, but I can’t quite put my finger on what→
• This problem is so knotty and interdependent that every time we brainstorm it, the room just locks onto whoever framed it first, and half the disagreement is really people picturing entirely different versions of the same mess.→
• The palace works fine for things I can picture, but most of what I’m trying to learn is abstract ideas and terms→
• I keep running into the same setup in my field but I have no name for it, so every time I have to laboriously piece it back together from its parts instead of just calling it one thing and moving on.→
• I’m trying to break into a craft from the outside, alone with the manuals, and I can feel there’s a whole layer of unwritten know-how→

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