The Five Options Technique

Definition

"When we are mulling over a challenge we face on our own, we tend to stop thinking creatively after two or three options." The Five Options Technique counters this by imposing a quota — keep asking "what else could you do?" until at least five distinct options exist — before allowing any evaluation or choice. The quota, not inspiration, is what pushes past the easy, obvious answers into the ones that actually required creative effort.

In the Book

The technique sits in the "Options" step of both the GROW model and the Coaching Funnel, and the book pairs the quota with two complementary moves for when a client runs dry: the Obstacle Approach (name what's actually blocking the goal, then generate options specifically to move around that named obstacle — "You've mentioned money several times as an obstacle. If you had all the money you needed, then what would you do?") and the Ideal Future Technique (visualize the best possible outcome first, then work backward to the present, because starting from the present tends to surface obstacles before options and gets people stuck). The book is candid about the technique's real payoff: "Sometimes after all this the person will go back and choose the very first option they voiced. That's not a failure! The value of going through the whole process is now they really believe it's the best option, and so it is more likely to get done." The quota isn't there to guarantee a better answer — it's there to guarantee the answer chosen has survived comparison against real alternatives.

Why It Matters

Groups and individuals converge on the first workable idea by default, not because it's best but because searching is effortful and stopping is a relief the moment a plausible answer appears. A hard minimum-count quota is a cheap, mechanical way to force the search past that stopping point without needing any actual insight into what a better idea would look like — and even when the quota just re-confirms the original answer, it converts a guess into a tested commitment, which changes how likely the answer is to survive contact with follow-through.