SMARTER Framework: 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 SMARTER Framework, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Practices that may help

1. Building a Second Brain (BASB), Made Practical
   Building a Second Brain (BASB) is Tiago Forte’s system for capturing, organizing, distilling, and expressing ideas using a personal knowledge management (PKM) system. The four-step CODE framework (Capture, Organize, Distill, Express) structures an external system that reduces the cognitive load of remembering and re-finding information. BASB is a practitioner framework grounded in cognitive-offloading and note-taking research rather than a formally tested protocol.
2. Use proven MECE frameworks as starting structures
   Standard frameworks (profit tree, 4Ps, Porter’s Five Forces) are pre-built MECE structures — use them rather than rebuilding from scratch.
   Issue Tree Analysis
3. Constantly distinguish the map from the territory
   A model is a simplification — know precisely where yours breaks down.
   Mental Models: Charlie Munger’s Latticework Approach
4. Question whether the category you’re reasoning from actually fits
   Before applying a model or framework, verify that the category it was built on genuinely matches your situation.
   The Ludic Fallacy: When You Mistake Real Life for a Game
5. Use morphological analysis for wicked problems with many interdependencies
   The method shines on problems too complex for brainstorming to cover adequately.
   Morphological Analysis, Made Practical
6. 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
7. Define — frame the right problem
   Synthesize your research into a single, sharp problem statement before solving.
   Design Thinking, Step by Step
8. Reason up from the parts, not by analogy
   Build the solution from the fundamentals you kept, rather than copying an existing template.
   First-Principles Thinking, Made Usable
9. Lead from the strategic thinking domain — absorb and analyze information
   People strong in strategic thinking keep the team focused on what could be, not just what is.
   Strengths-Based Leadership, Made Practical
10. Make Time, Made Practical
    Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky’s system runs on a simple daily loop — Highlight, Laser, Energy, Reflect — designed to defend one meaningful priority a day against the pull of "Busy Bandwagon" culture and "Infinity Pool" apps. The components rest on solid ideas about attention, friction, and energy, though the framework is a designer’s synthesis rather than a tested protocol.

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

• I’m trying to build the whole breakdown of this problem from a blank page, reinventing the structure from scratch, and it’s slow and I keep missing obvious pieces→
• I trust my favorite framework so completely that I apply it everywhere without checking, and lately it’s been quietly steering me wrong→
• I’m reaching for a framework that worked great somewhere else and dropping it onto this situation, and a part of me isn’t sure the two cases are actually the same kind of thing underneath→
• This problem is so knotty and interdependent that every time we brainstorm it, the room just locks onto whoever framed it first, and half the disagreement is really people picturing entirely different versions of the same mess.→
• Every new project I start from a blank page as if I’ve never done anything like it, even though I’ve solved half of it before→

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