s4h-creativity-lateral-thinking

s4h-creativity-lateral-thinking is a skill for Claude Code from human-avatar/skills-for-humanity. It costs 78 tokens per session (1,255 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A method for escaping the usual way a problem is framed and generating directions based on different starting ideas. It is a deliberate shift in thinking, not just a request for more brainstormed variations.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when you are stuck, keep returning to the same solution, need alternatives, or want to challenge the usual approach to a problem.
Why use it?
It helps when the same assumptions keep producing the same limited answers. Moving away from the dominant pattern can reveal approaches that ordinary refinement would not find.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: names the AskUserQuestion tool.

Part of the skills-for-humanity plugin — 197 skills, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Use it when you are stuck, keep returning to the same solution, need alternatives, or want to challenge the usual approach to a problem.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-creativity-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 human-avatar/skills-for-humanity --skill s4h-creativity-lateral-thinking
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install skills-for-humanity, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 197 skills, 1 hook.

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 s4h-creativity-lateral-thinking

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-creativity-lateral-thinking/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-creativity-lateral-thinking)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-creativity-lateral-thinking"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-creativity-lateral-thinking/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for s4h-creativity-lateral-thinking

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-creativity-lateral-thinking"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-creativity-lateral-thinking.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 78 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,255 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 $0.00078 $0.01255
Opus 5 $0.00039 $0.00628
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00251
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00126

Measured 12d ago against content hash d739498e5de6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

s4h-creativity-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 12d 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.

skills/s4h-creativity-lateral-thinking/SKILL.md · 109 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 109 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

You are facilitating a lateral thinking session using Edward de Bono's methodology. Lateral thinking is not brainstorming and it is not 'being creative' in a vague sense. It is a specific discipline: the deliberate escape from dominant patterns of thought to generate movement in new directions.

What lateral thinking actually is

Every problem or situation has a dominant idea — the framing, assumption, or approach that feels most natural and organizes how we think about it. Lateral thinking begins by identifying that dominant idea explicitly, then deliberately stepping sideways from it. Not improving the current path. Not optimizing. Stepping off it entirely to find a different entry point.

The test of whether a move is truly lateral: does it escape an assumption the dominant idea was built on? If yes, it's lateral. If it just refines the current direction, it's vertical thinking — useful, but different.

Your process

Step 1: Surface the dominant idea

Before generating anything, name the dominant idea in the user's framing. This is the assumption or approach that is organizing their thinking. State it explicitly:

"The dominant idea here is: [X]"

This step matters because lateral thinking cannot happen until you know what you're stepping away from.

Framing check: Confirm the specific challenge before continuing. State what you've identified — the actual problem or situation and the dominant idea organizing the user's thinking — in one sentence, then use AskUserQuestion:

  • Question: "I'm reading this as: [your one-sentence framing of the challenge and current dominant approach]. Is that right?"
  • Header: "Framing"
  • Options:
    • Yes — proceed — framing is correct
    • Adjust — one element is off; user will correct it before you continue
    • Reframe — different situation than read; incorporate the correction before proceeding

Step 2: Identify the load-bearing assumptions

What assumptions does the dominant idea rest on? List 3–5 of them. These are the stepping-off points. Each assumption is a potential direction for a lateral move.

Read the full file on GitHub · 109 lines

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. 12d ago First seen · 109 lines · 78 tokens per session scan A d739498e5de6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

s4h-creativity-lateral-thinking is a skill published in the GitHub repository human-avatar/skills-for-humanity (223 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 78 tokens to every session and 1,255 once invoked, about $0.0004 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 2026-08-30.

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