Working Genius Combinations: 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 Working Genius Combinations, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Practices that may help
- 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 - Build a "collector’s mind" — capture everything interesting, then look for connections
Keep an active idea collection so you can search it for unexpected pairings when you need them.
Combinatorial Creativity, Made Practical - Deliberately explore the most unlikely combinations
The combinations intuition skips are precisely the ones the method is designed to find.
Morphological Analysis, Made Practical - The 6 Types of Working Genius (Patrick Lencioni)
Patrick Lencioni’s Working Genius model describes six activities — Wonder, Invention, Discernment, Galvanizing, Enablement, and Tenacity — that are required to complete any meaningful work. Each person finds two of these energizing (geniuses), two draining (frustrations), and two neutral (competencies). The model is a practitioner framework; it lacks independent peer-reviewed validation, but it provides a practically useful vocabulary for team role awareness. - Combinatorial Creativity, Made Practical
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. - Combine
Ask: what two things — purposes, materials, functions, or ideas — could be merged to create something new?
SCAMPER: A Systematic Creativity Technique - Filter the matrix with cross-consistency assessment
Identify which value combinations are impossible or contradictory to reduce the space to viable solutions.
Morphological Analysis, Made Practical - Build a deliberately broad input diet
Expose yourself to domains far outside your expertise to stock the combinatorial engine.
Combinatorial Creativity, Made Practical - Route decisions to your Discernment genius
Evaluation decisions drain Wonder and Tenacity geniuses — protect your evaluators and route decisions to them.
The 6 Types of Working Genius (Patrick Lencioni) - Keep a "what if" journal for speculative combinations
Write out daily "what if X and Y were combined" prompts — and take the speculative ones seriously.
Combinatorial Creativity, Made Practical
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I treat every idea on my list as its own separate thing, judging each one solo, and it never occurs to me to mash two of them together
- Fascinating little ideas and connections hit me all the time, but I never write any of them down, so when I’m finally staring at a problem that one of them would’ve cracked, it’s long gone and I can’t pull it back.
- Even after all this work I notice I’m gravitating right back to the safe, familiar combinations and skipping the strange ones
- I have two separate things that each work fine on their own, and I keep sensing that the real idea is in mashing them into one
- I’ve laid out thousands of possible combinations and now I’m drowning in them
Related concerns
- Working Genius Combinations Examples
Treat every idea as a building block — the best ideas in a session are usually hybrids.
Combine and build on others’ ideas
- Combinatorial Creativity At Work
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.
- Idea Combination
Treat every idea as a building block — the best ideas in a session are usually hybrids.
- Unlikely Combinations
Identify which value combinations are impossible or contradictory to reduce the space to viable solutions.
Filter the matrix with cross-consistency assessment
- Working Genius Combinations Test
Treat every idea as a building block — the best ideas in a session are usually hybrids.
- Combinatorial Creativity For My Teenager
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.
Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.