New Tricks Creative Problem-Solving: 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 New Tricks Creative Problem-Solving, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Practices that may help
- Sample inventive principles to generate solution directions
Apply one or more of TRIZ’s 40 inventive principles as generative lenses, even without the full contradiction matrix.
TRIZ: Systematic Invention and the Logic of Contradictions - Break associative barriers through randomness
Introduce random stimuli — words, objects, images — into your problem-solving sessions and force connections.
The Medici Effect: Innovation at the Intersection - SCAMPER: A Systematic Creativity Technique
SCAMPER is a structured brainstorming checklist that prompts you to Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify/Magnify, Put to other uses, Eliminate, and Reverse/Rearrange elements of an existing product, process, or problem. It is a practitioner-derived tool with no randomized trial evidence but a strong theoretical grounding in divergent thinking research — it works by forcing systematic exploration of an idea space that unguided brainstorming leaves partially uncovered. - Use a routine physical task to incubate a creative problem
Assign your stuck creative problem to your mind, then do a boring manual task and let the problem run in the background.
Boredom and Creativity: Why Your Best Ideas Need Idle Time - Borrow the conventions of a different field and apply them to yours
Take the organizing principles of an adjacent discipline and treat them as constraints for your creative problem — the unfamiliar conventions force beginner perception.
The Beginner’s Mind in Creative Practice - Use forced analogy to generate unexpected solutions
Randomly pair your problem with an unrelated domain and mine the analogy for ideas.
Combinatorial Creativity, Made Practical - Use SCAMPER and other prompts to vary ideas
Apply structured prompts (substitute, combine, adapt, modify, etc.) to push ideas in new directions.
Divergent Thinking: Generating Many Ideas - Solution-space exploration
Generate multiple different approaches to a problem before converging on one.
Productive Failure: How Struggling First Makes Instruction More Effective - 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 - Express work in reusable intermediate packets
Break your creative output into small, reusable units — outlines, summaries, frameworks — that can be combined and repurposed.
Building a Second Brain (BASB), Made Practical
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I’ve been brainstorming this for hours and every idea is a slight variation on the same one
- My mind keeps running down the exact same worn grooves on this problem
- I’m jammed on a problem and just grinding at it harder, staring at the screen forcing it, when I know my actual breakthroughs always come sideways in the shower or on a walk
- Everything I make comes out in the same shape because the rules of my field are so baked into me I can’t even see them anymore
- I’m stuck on one specific problem and I keep circling the same three obvious options my field always reaches for
Related concerns
- Creative Problem Solving Activities
Assign your stuck creative problem to your mind, then do a boring manual task and let the problem run in the background.
Use a routine physical task to incubate a creative problem
- Creative Problem Solving Stimulus
Introduce random stimuli — words, objects, images — into your problem-solving sessions and force connections.
Break associative barriers through randomness
- Creative Approaches To Problem Solving
Expand from specific solutions to the broader concept behind them, then generate alternatives at the concept level.
Concept fan: map the solution space before picking a direction
- Creative Problem Solving
Identify the key dimensions that fully describe your problem space before generating solutions.
Decompose the problem into independent parameters
- Creative Problem Solving Examples
Describe your problem as if it were a challenge in an unrelated field, then steal the solutions from that field.
Import a frame from a different domain
- Creative Problem Solving Methods
Identify the key dimensions that fully describe your problem space before generating solutions.
Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.