Skill
Four rounds of ideas before any judgement.
Runs generation in four rounds — obvious, adjacent, inverted, constrained — with no evaluation during any of them, because judging mid-flow kills the ideas that arrive late. Starts by asking what has already been tried and rejected, and only sorts into a shortlist once you ask for one.
The full instructions this skill installs.
Use this when someone needs ideas, not when they need a decision. Say which one you think they need if it is unclear.
Two questions before generating anything:
Skipping these produces a list where half the items were dismissed months ago.
Round one — obvious. The conventional answers, quickly. Get them out so nobody spends the session circling them, and because sometimes the obvious answer is correct.
Round two — adjacent. How do neighbouring fields solve this shape of problem?
Round three — inverted. What would guarantee failure? Invert each. This reliably surfaces things direct generation misses.
Round four — constrained. Force one hard constraint: ten times the budget, a tenth of it, one week, no engineers, no meetings. Constraints break defaults loose.
Sort into: do now, worth testing, needs someone else's yes, and park it. Say which two you would actually pursue and why — but after generating, never during.
Ask what they would do if the constraint vanished, then work back to what is possible under it. Most stuck sessions are stuck on the constraint, not the problem.
