lateral-thinking

lateral-thinking is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from deciqAI/knowledge-skills. It costs 112 tokens per session (2,213 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A structured approach to finding solutions by changing the starting point or challenging familiar assumptions. It turns ideas such as “think outside the box” into repeatable exercises.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps generate alternatives, question industry habits, reframe problems, and find new approaches when conventional analysis has stalled.
Why use it?
It helps when a team keeps returning to the same limited options even though none of them works well.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit It helps generate alternatives, question industry habits, reframe problems, and find new approaches when conventional analysis has stalled.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/lateral-thinking
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add deciqAI/knowledge-skills --skill lateral-thinking
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/deciqAI/knowledge-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for lateral-thinking

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/lateral-thinking.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/lateral-thinking)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/lateral-thinking"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/lateral-thinking.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 112 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,213 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00112 $0.02213
Opus 5 $0.00056 $0.01107
Sonnet 5 $0.00022 $0.00443
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00221

Measured 5d ago against content hash df11615313be, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

lateral-thinking scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 5d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

lateral-thinking/SKILL.md · 123 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 123 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Lateral Thinking

Overview

Lateral thinking is the discipline of solving problems by approaching them from unexpected angles — not by going deeper along an existing logical path but by moving sideways to a new starting point. Coined by Edward de Bono, it converts creative leaps into learnable, repeatable techniques: assumption challenge, random entry, concept extraction, and PO (Provocative Operation). The brain is a pattern-forming system — lateral thinking deliberately disrupts those patterns to make invisible solutions visible.

Compose with neighbors: Use first-principles before lateral thinking to clear inherited assumptions. Use six-thinking-hats after to evaluate ideas generated (Green Hat = lateral thinking space). Use inversion as a lightweight lateral move when time is short.

When to Use

Use when: team cycles through the same 2–3 options; an industry assumption has gone years untested; someone says "think outside the box / we need a breakthrough / how might we / we've tried everything"; solution space feels exhausted despite good problem definition.

When NOT: problem has a mathematical optimum; decision needed in under 5 min; team lacks domain knowledge (use first-principles first); task requires rigorous proof.

Coaching Novices (Adaptive Front Door)

  • Engine mode: user brings a specific stuck problem → run The Process directly.
  • Coach mode: user signals unfamiliarity or asks "what is this / how does it work?" → guide step by step.

In Coach mode, respond one step at a time. Each [WAIT] is a hard stop — output only that step's question, then stop.

  1. One-line what-it-is: lateral thinking is about starting from a different place, not going deeper on the same path — four specific techniques, not hoping inspiration strikes.
  2. Check fit against When to Use / When NOT to use — if the problem has a clear optimal answer, redirect; if time is very short, offer inversion instead.
  3. Elicit their real stuck problem. "We need to be more innovative" is not workable; "our checkout conversion hasn't improved in 18 months despite A/B testing" is.

[WAIT — do not advance until user responds]

  1. Walk through assumption challenge → random entry → concept extraction → PO one at a time. Pose each technique as a question and wait before advancing.

[WAIT — do not advance until user responds]

  1. Close by naming the specific assumption or pattern they broke. The cognitive move is more valuable than any single idea it produced.

[WAIT — do not advance until user responds]

Read the full file on GitHub · 123 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 5d ago First seen · 123 lines · 112 tokens per session scan A df11615313be

Subscribe to this mod's changes

lateral-thinking is a skill published in the GitHub repository deciqAI/knowledge-skills (10 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 112 tokens to every session and 2,213 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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