Coaching practices for Oblique Strategies Element

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

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

• 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 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
• I’ve been brainstorming this for hours and every idea is a slight variation on the same one
• Someone floats an extreme position and suddenly the next thing they propose feels so reasonable by comparison that I find myself agreeing
• I can see exactly the moment I’m going to slip

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. 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
3. WOOP: Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan
   WOOP — Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan — is Gabriele Oettingen’s science-based goal strategy: you picture the best outcome, then deliberately confront the inner obstacle in your way, and pair it with an if-then plan. Unlike pure positive thinking, WOOP combines mental contrasting with implementation intentions, and both halves have genuine support from randomized trials.
4. 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
5. Mental Contrasting and WOOP
   Mental contrasting — Gabriele Oettingen’s technique of vividly imagining your desired future and then confronting it with the specific obstacles standing in the way — activates the motivational and planning systems simultaneously. When combined with implementation intentions (WOOP: Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan), multiple RCTs find improved goal achievement across health, academic, and professional domains — though effect sizes are moderate and the full WOOP sequence matters more than any single step.
6. 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
7. 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
8. Form an if-then plan linking the obstacle to a specific response
   "If [obstacle occurs], then I will [specific action]" — this plan is what converts mental contrasting into behavior change.
   Mental Contrasting and WOOP
9. 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
10. Run the full WOOP sequence — not just parts of it
    WOOP works as a sequence; running only the wish and outcome steps (pure positive visualization) is not WOOP and may be counterproductive.
    Mental Contrasting and WOOP

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