Coaching practices for Steven Johnson Where Good Ideas Come From

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Steven Johnson Where Good Ideas Come From, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

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

• Everyone I talk to does basically what I do and reads what I read, so my ideas just keep recycling the same stuff
• I grab the first decent idea that shows up and run with it, because it seems good enough and I’m impatient
• I stop brainstorming the moment I have a few decent ideas, satisfied too early
• I get these half-formed ideas that feel like they could be something, but I either jump on them too early and they fizzle into the obvious, or I lose them entirely
• I come up with three or four obvious options, one of them seems fine, and I just grab it

Practices that may help

1. Build a liquid network: expose yourself to people at the edge of different fields
   Seek out conversations and environments where ideas from adjacent fields are in the air — most good ideas are collisions, not inventions.
   The Adjacent Possible, Made Practical
2. Quantity first: generate the most ideas possible before evaluating any
   The best way to have a good idea is to have many ideas — originality rises with volume, so generate recklessly before selecting.
   The Beginner’s Mind in Creative Practice
3. Maximize quantity of ideas before evaluating
   Set an explicit quantity target — generate at least 20 ideas before reviewing any of them.
   The Medici Effect: Innovation at the Intersection
4. Cultivate the slow hunch: let ideas develop over months, not hours
   Resist the urge to act on a half-formed idea; keep it alive in a notebook until adjacent pieces arrive to complete it.
   The Adjacent Possible, Made Practical
5. The Three Bs of Creativity: Bed, Bath, and Bus
   The "three Bs" — Bed, Bath, and Bus — name the observation that creative breakthroughs often arrive during unfocused, mind-wandering states rather than at the desk. The underlying mechanism (incubation: unconscious associative processing continues after focused effort stops) has real experimental support. You can deliberately engineer conditions that make these moments more productive.
6. Go for quantity first
   Aim for a high number of ideas; the best ones tend to come later in the list.
   Divergent Thinking: Generating Many Ideas
7. Use low-demand movement as incubation time
   Walking, showering, or doing dishes — rhythmic, low-demand activities free up associative thinking.
   The Three Bs of Creativity: Bed, Bath, and Bus
8. Go for quantity over quality
   Set a raw count target — the goal is many ideas, not good ones.
   Osborn’s Brainstorming Rules, Made Practical
9. Honor the muse by showing up consistently
   Inspiration arrives for those who are already at the desk — consistency is the practice that invites it.
   The War of Art, Made Practical
10. Capture ideas the moment they surface
    Incubation insights are fragile — they must be captured within seconds or they’re gone.
    The Three Bs of Creativity: Bed, Bath, and Bus

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