Coaching practices for Oblique Strategies During a Big Change
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Oblique Strategies During a Big Change, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I keep selling this change as a clear win and can’t understand why people are dragging their feet
- I’ve got a big move (or a new job) coming up in a couple of months, and I can feel it’s a rare chance to start fresh
- 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
- I’ve thrown so much at this change and it still won’t stick, and I honestly can’t tell whether the real problem is that I don’t want it enough, don’t know how, or my whole setup makes it impossible
- I keep throwing action plans and systems at this change and getting nowhere, and I’m starting to suspect I jumped straight to "do it" when I haven’t even really decided yet
Practices that may help
- 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. - Name the loss the adaptive challenge requires
Explicitly acknowledge what people must give up — not just what they will gain.
Adaptive Leadership, Made Practical - Identify and anticipate upcoming transition windows
Treat approaching life changes as scheduled opportunities for habit installation — plan before the transition, not after.
The Habit Discontinuity Effect - 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 - Diagnose before you prescribe with COM-B
Before picking a strategy, identify which of Capability, Opportunity, or Motivation is the bottleneck.
The COM-B Model and Behavior Change Wheel - Identify your current stage before choosing a strategy
Diagnose where you actually are in the change cycle before deciding what to do.
The Transtheoretical Model of Change, Made Practical - Draft three genuinely different five-year plans
Sketch three distinct five-year lives — not variations on the same theme, but genuinely different directions.
Odyssey Plans: Designing Three Alternative Futures - Invoke the outside view before committing to any significant plan
Before finalizing a plan or forecast, ask "How did similar things go?" as the first checkpoint.
The Outside View - Find the high-leverage intervention point
Look for the structural change that produces large effects for small effort.
Systems Thinking - Diagnose the challenge before choosing the response
Ask whether the problem requires new expertise (technical) or new values and behavior (adaptive).
Adaptive Leadership, Made Practical
Related concerns
- Choice Architecture During A Big Change
Choice architecture — the arrangement of options in a decision environment — powerfully biases outcomes through default effects, ordering, salience, and framing. Thaler and Sunstein showed this is true whether or not anyone designed it deliberately, which means you can redesign your environment to bias yourself toward better choices.
- How Do You Deal With Change
Explicitly acknowledge what people must give up — not just what they will gain.
Name the loss the adaptive challenge requires
- Systems Thinking During A Big Change
Look for the structural change that produces large effects for small effort.
Find the high-leverage intervention point
- The Ackerman Method During A Big Change
The Ackerman method, popularized by Chris Voss in Never Split the Difference, is a structured offer-and-counteroffer system. You set a target price, then make a sequence of calculated bids that converge on that target with decreasing increments — signaling that you are near your limit even as you create the appearance of flexibility. The method uses psychology to make your counterpart feel they have won a hard bargain.
- How To Deal With Change
Change how you interpret a stressor — its meaning, scope, and permanence — to change its emotional impact.
Reframe through cognitive reappraisal
- How To Deal With Change Management
Explicitly acknowledge what people must give up — not just what they will gain.
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