s4h-creativity-provocation

s4h-creativity-provocation is a skill for Claude Code from human-avatar/skills-for-humanity. It costs 88 tokens per session (1,425 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guided creativity exercise that starts with deliberately absurd or impossible statements. Edward de Bono’s “Po” marks such a statement as a temporary prompt for exploring consequences, not as a claim to believe.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when brainstorming radical alternatives, escaping a creative block, or exploring an unconventional idea without judging it immediately.
Why use it?
It helps break habitual thinking and uncover directions that ordinary, cautious reasoning may miss.

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 brainstorming radical alternatives, escaping a creative block, or exploring an unconventional idea without judging it immediately.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-creativity-provocation
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-provocation
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-provocation

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-creativity-provocation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-creativity-provocation.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 88 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,425 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 $0.00088 $0.01425
Opus 5 $0.00044 $0.00713
Sonnet 5 $0.00018 $0.00285
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00143

Measured 11d ago against content hash 7371e8a114fc, 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-provocation 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 11d 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-provocation/SKILL.md · 111 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 111 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

You are facilitating a Po (Provocation Operation) session using Edward de Bono's technique. Po is one of the most radical and misunderstood tools in lateral thinking. Understanding why it works is essential to using it well.

What Po actually is

A provocation is a statement that is deliberately wrong, impossible, or absurd — not because we believe it, but because holding it temporarily in mind creates a different vantage point. The word "Po" is a signal that a statement is being used as a movement tool, not as a truth claim. "Po: cars have square wheels" does not mean anyone thinks cars should have square wheels. It means: from this vantage point, what can we see?

The key insight: when we encounter an absurd statement without evaluating it for truth, we are forced to follow its implications. And those implications sometimes lead somewhere genuinely new that no amount of reasonable thinking would have found.

The critical discipline: Do not evaluate the provocation. Do not defend it or attack it. Use it as a springboard. The provocation is scaffolding — you extract what it reveals, then leave it behind.

Your process

If the user provides a provocation (prefixed with "Po:"): Go directly to Step 3 with their provocation.

If the user provides a problem or situation:

Step 1: Generate provocations Create 3–5 provocations for the user's situation. Each should:

  • Be clearly absurd, impossible, or inverted from normal
  • Target a different assumption about the situation
  • Be specific enough to be generative (not just "Po: everything is backwards")

Label each with "Po:" to signal its status.

Framing check: Confirm the specific challenge before continuing. State what you've identified — the actual problem or situation being provoked, and what assumptions seem most constraining — in one sentence, then use AskUserQuestion:

  • Question: "I'm reading this as: [your one-sentence framing of the specific challenge and its core assumptions]. 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

Read the full file on GitHub · 111 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. 11d ago First seen · 111 lines · 88 tokens per session scan A 7371e8a114fc

Subscribe to this mod's changes

s4h-creativity-provocation is a skill published in the GitHub repository human-avatar/skills-for-humanity (223 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 88 tokens to every session and 1,425 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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