Coaching practices for Making Ideas Happen
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Making Ideas Happen, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- 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
- I keep dragging the big-picture dreamers into the tedious finishing work and asking my finishers to brainstorm wild ideas, and everyone’s miserable and the handoffs are a mess
- In our brainstorms someone floats something and the instinct in the room
- 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
- I keep planning this thing in my head where it all seems to work perfectly, but the second I try to actually make it I realize I had no idea what I really wanted
Practices that may help
- 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 - Assign project phases to genius-matched people
Route early ideation to Wonder/Invention geniuses and execution phases to Tenacity geniuses.
The 6 Types of Working Genius (Patrick Lencioni) - Build on others’ ideas with "Yes, and…"
Make every idea in a group session a platform to build from, not a proposal to assess.
Creative Confidence, 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 - Prototype to think, not to finish
Build or sketch something rough specifically to learn what you actually want.
Quantity Over Quality: How More Drafts Produce Better Work - Keep side projects and play
Protect a low-stakes project with no goal — the “waste” is where the real ideas surface.
Steal Like an Artist, in Practice - Keep a "what if" journal for speculative combinations
Write out daily "what if X and Y were combined" prompts — and take the speculative ones seriously.
Combinatorial Creativity, Made Practical - 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 - Treat creativity as combination
Make new work by joining two existing things that haven’t been joined before.
Steal Like an Artist, in Practice - 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
Related concerns
- How To Build On Ideas
Treat every idea as a building block — the best ideas in a session are usually hybrids.
Combine and build on others’ ideas
- Build On Ideas Brainstorming
Treat every idea as a building block — the best ideas in a session are usually hybrids.
- When Oblique Strategies Repeat Yourself
"Use an old idea" — something already in your history may work now that it could not before.
Repeat, loop, or return to an old idea deliberately
- Wild Ideas Brainstorming
Explicitly invite the absurd — it’s easier to tame a wild idea than to enliven a dull one.
Welcome wild and outrageous ideas
- Bad Ideas Brainstorm
Ask "How would we guarantee the worst possible outcome?" — then invert every answer.
Reverse brainstorm: solve the opposite problem first
- Brainstorming Agreement
Have people generate ideas silently and individually first, then pool and build.
Brainwrite instead of group brainstorm
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