Coaching practices for Everything I Come Up with is the Same Kind of Answer Everyone in My Field Would Give I'm Drawing From the Same Shallow Well as Always and I Can Feel That the Fresh Idea Would Have to Come From Somewhere Totally Outside it

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Everything I Come Up with is the Same Kind of Answer Everyone in My Field Would Give I'm Drawing From the Same Shallow Well as Always and I Can Feel That the Fresh Idea Would Have to Come From Somewhere Totally Outside it, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

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

• Everything I come up with is the same kind of answer everyone in my field would give
• Every idea I generate for this is the obvious one, the one anyone in my field would land on, and none of it feels fresh
• Everyone I talk to does basically what I do and reads what I read, so my ideas just keep recycling the same stuff
• I’m stuck on one specific problem and I keep circling the same three obvious options my field always reaches for
• Every idea I come up with is basically a tweak on what someone’s already done

Practices that may help

1. Cross-pollinate from distant domains
   Pull ideas and analogies from fields unrelated to your problem.
   Divergent Thinking: Generating Many Ideas
2. Treat creativity as combination
   Make new work by joining two existing things that haven’t been joined before.
   Steal Like an Artist, in Practice
3. 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
4. Use forced analogy to generate unexpected solutions
   Randomly pair your problem with an unrelated domain and mine the analogy for ideas.
   Combinatorial Creativity, Made Practical
5. 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
6. Intentional field-crossing
   Regularly study a field entirely outside your domain and ask what it could teach yours.
   The Medici Effect: Innovation at the Intersection
7. Build a deliberately broad input diet
   Expose yourself to domains far outside your expertise to stock the combinatorial engine.
   Combinatorial Creativity, Made Practical
8. Build a diverse network deliberately
   Connect with people in different disciplines, cultures, and functions — not primarily with people who do what you do.
   The Medici Effect: Innovation at the Intersection
9. 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
10. Seek analogies from maximally distant domains
    The further the analogy’s domain from your problem, the more likely it is to break your current representation.
    Constraint Relaxation: Escaping the Walls You Built Yourself

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