Lateral Thinking

Generate novel, testable ideas by finding mechanisms that transfer across fields.

Use this skill when ordinary analysis is already exhausted and the user needs a good second or third lens, not a recap of the obvious first one. distill compresses a system to its essential primitives; lateral-thinking uses those primitives to generate non-obvious hypotheses. If both apply, distill first, then run lateral thinking on the clarified skeleton.

Ring Model

Start beyond the obvious.

• Ring 0-1: standard advice, baseline literature, first-order domain answers
• Ring 2: component decomposition and overlooked regulators
• Ring 3: cross-domain transfer of mechanisms from distant fields