Coaching practices for Oblique Strategies with My Team
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Oblique Strategies with My Team, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- When I ask my team how to make this succeed they just reinforce the direction we’re already pointed, but I have a hunch that if I flipped it and asked how we’d deliberately sabotage this thing, the risks they’re too polite to raise would come pouring out.
- My departments are each winning their own little battles while the whole thing loses
- I’ve planned this whole move as if our competitor will just sit there and take it
- Our team has patterns that everyone outside us seems to see clearly while none of us inside it can
- Everyone on my team is quietly playing for their own scoreboard
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. - Use reverse brainstorming to find failure modes
Ask "how would we make this fail?" instead of "how do we make this succeed?"
Red Teaming: Stress-Testing Plans Before They Fail - Cover and move (teamwork over silos)
Every team and department exists to support the others toward the same mission, not to win locally.
Extreme Ownership, Made Practical - Simulate the adversary’s response to your move
Assign someone to genuinely think and plan as your competitor, not just describe them.
Red Teaming: Stress-Testing Plans Before They Fail - Use the Johari Window in team settings
Apply the window at the team level to improve shared understanding and reduce inter-member blind spots.
The Johari Window - Align around collective results, not individual status
Teams fail when members prioritize their own visibility or department’s success over the shared goal.
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Made Practical - Build a team whose combined strengths cover all four domains
Hire and assemble deliberately for domain coverage, not for people who think like you.
Strengths-Based Leadership, Made Practical - 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 - 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 - Run a structured team morphological session
The method is most powerful when multiple perspectives populate the dimensions and values.
Morphological Analysis, Made Practical
Related concerns
- Cross Team Collaboration
Every team and department exists to support the others toward the same mission, not to win locally.
Cover and move (teamwork over silos)
- Systems Thinking With My Team
Make the assumptions behind decisions explicit — they are often the root structural cause.
Surface and test the mental models driving behavior
- When The Johari Window Johari In Teams
Apply the window at the team level to improve shared understanding and reduce inter-member blind spots.
Use the Johari Window in team settings
- Collective Results Team
Teams fail when members prioritize their own visibility or department’s success over the shared goal.
Align around collective results, not individual status
- Competitor Red Team
Assign someone to genuinely think and plan as your competitor, not just describe them.
Simulate the adversary’s response to your move
- Essentialism With My Team
Make every team member feel valued and accepted as a human being before expecting performance.
Establish inclusion safety — belonging without conditions
Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.