Coaching practices for Oblique Strategies at Work

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

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

• I’ve decided the lesson from this success is “focus narrow” or “go big”
• I know which option is genuinely best for my team, but every time I lay all the choices out flat they get lost in the noise and people drift to the wrong one
• Someone floats an extreme position and suddenly the next thing they propose feels so reasonable by comparison that I find myself agreeing
• Something’s off in this piece but I can’t tell what, and every time I get frustrated I tear the whole thing down and rebuild from scratch
• There are so many options on the table that I’ve stopped weighing each one and started just grabbing for whatever looks easiest to compare

Practices that may help

1. Oblique Strategies, Made Practical
   Oblique Strategies is a deck of constraint-based prompts created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt to interrupt habitual thinking during creative blocks. The prompts work by forcing an indirect, unexpected approach to a problem rather than attacking it head-on. Evidence for constraint-based creativity is solid in cognitive research; the specific deck is widely used in music, design, and writing with strong anecdotal support.
2. Steelman the strategy opposite to the successful one
   Before adopting a lesson from a success story, build the best possible case for the opposite approach.
   Survivorship Bias: Learning from What You Can’t See
3. Use the decoy structure to guide others toward better options
   If you’re structuring choices for a team or organization, include a dominated option to help people recognize and choose the best option.
   The Decoy Effect — How an Irrelevant Option Changes Your Choice
4. Recognize decoys in political and narrative framing
   In debates and narratives, an extreme position is often introduced to make a moderate position seem reasonable — identify this before updating.
   The Decoy Effect — How an Irrelevant Option Changes Your Choice
5. Change exactly one element and observe what shifts
   Alter a single variable at a time to see how the rest of the system responds.
   Oblique Strategies, Made Practical
6. Simplify complex choices to prevent comparison fatigue from enabling decoys
   Too many options increase susceptibility to decoys — constrain the comparison set before evaluating.
   The Decoy Effect — How an Irrelevant Option Changes Your Choice
7. 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
8. Evaluate each option against your criteria before comparing options to each other
   Score options independently first — so the comparison set can’t retroactively redefine what good looks like.
   The Decoy Effect — How an Irrelevant Option Changes Your Choice
9. Test whether a ZOPA exists before investing further
   When you suspect there may be no overlap, surface the zone gap early rather than investing time in an impossible deal.
   ZOPA: The Zone of Possible Agreement
10. Make multiple equivalent simultaneous offers (MESOs)
    Propose several package deals of equal value to you — see which the other side prefers.
    Expanding the Pie: Negotiation Beyond Splitting the Difference

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