Coaching practices for I Keep Generating Alternatives but They're All Just Minor Variations of the Same Basic Approach I Want to Back Up to the Underlying Idea Itself and See If There's a Whole Different Way to Come at What I'm After
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Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I keep generating "alternatives" but they’re all just minor variations of the same basic approach
- Every idea I come up with is basically a tweak on what someone’s already done
- I come up with three or four obvious options, one of them seems fine, and I just grab it
- Even after all this work I notice I’m gravitating right back to the safe, familiar combinations and skipping the strange ones
- I’ve worked through every viable option and they’re all just flavors of mediocre
Practices that may help
- Concept fan: map the solution space before picking a direction
Expand from specific solutions to the broader concept behind them, then generate alternatives at the concept level.
Lateral Thinking, Made Practical - 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 - 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 - Deliberately explore the most unlikely combinations
The combinations intuition skips are precisely the ones the method is designed to find.
Morphological Analysis, Made Practical - Iterate the matrix when solutions appear insufficient
If all combinations seem mediocre, the dimensions may be wrong — reframe them before generating more.
Morphological Analysis, Made Practical - 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 - Solution-space exploration
Generate multiple different approaches to a problem before converging on one.
Productive Failure: How Struggling First Makes Instruction More Effective - Ask what a specific other person would do
Step into a named other’s perspective to access approaches you would not generate as yourself.
Oblique Strategies, Made Practical - Combine and build on others’ ideas
Treat every idea as a building block — the best ideas in a session are usually hybrids.
Osborn’s Brainstorming Rules, Made Practical - 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
Related concerns
- Multiple Solution Strategies
Identify which value combinations are impossible or contradictory to reduce the space to viable solutions.
Filter the matrix with cross-consistency assessment
- Parallel Thinking Method
Treat every idea as a building block — the best ideas in a session are usually hybrids.
Combine and build on others’ ideas
- When Steal Like An Artist Creativity As Combination
Make new work by joining two existing things that haven’t been joined before.
Treat creativity as combination
- When Oblique Strategies Ask What Would Someone Else Do
Step into a named other’s perspective to access approaches you would not generate as yourself.
Ask what a specific other person would do
- Altshuller Inventive Principles
Determine whether your problem is already solved elsewhere before investing in original invention.
Calibrate whether the problem requires invention or just search
- Combinatorial Creativity During A Big Change
Arthur Koestler’s bisociation theory holds that creative breakthroughs emerge when two previously unconnected frames of reference collide and suddenly fit — not from blank-slate invention but from unexpected combination. The practical implication is that creative output depends heavily on the breadth and diversity of your input: you can only combine what you have already absorbed.
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