Provocation

by danium

Provocation is an AI Engineering skill for Claude Code, published by danium in lateral-thinking.

216 stars14 forkson danium/lateral-thinkingAdded 2026/08/11+88% in starsRepository updated 2026/07/09

View source on GitHub Download repo ZIP

agent-skillsbrainstormingclaude-codecodexcreativitylateral-thinking

Install in seconds

Install Provocation

Copy Provocation into your Claude Code skills folder. Run the command in your terminal, or review the source on GitHub before installing.

terminal

npx degit https://github.com/danium/lateral-thinking/tree/main/skills/provocation ~/.claude/skills/provocation

Requires Node.js. Downloads this skill only — not the rest of the repository — into your Claude Code skills folder.

Without Node.js

git clone https://github.com/danium/lateral-thinking.git

Clones the whole repository, then copy the skill’s own directory into your skills folder yourself.

In this catalog

Source file: skills/provocation/SKILL.md in danium/lateral-thinking
Installs to: ~/.claude/skills/provocation
Collection: One of 9 skills cataloged from this repository
Category: AI Engineering — 2451 skills

What Provocation does

Use Edward de Bono's Provocation technique to break unbreakable constraints by stating deliberately absurd things and extracting innovative movement. Ideal when designs converge or the usual answers are stale.

Provocation is cataloged under AI Engineering on DirSkills. Provocation comes from a repository tagged agent-skills, brainstorming, claude-code, codex and creativity.

Documentation

README

Excerpt

Provocation (Po)

What this technique does

State something deliberately wrong, impossible, or absurd about the problem — then refuse to judge it. Instead, ask what useful movement the statement creates: the principle hiding inside it, what would happen moment-to-moment if it were true, what that makes different from today. The absurd statement is not a proposal; it is a stepping stone you stand on only long enough to reach somewhere you could not have walked to directly. It works because judgment and movement are opposite mental motions, and every honest constraint you carry is also a wall you have stopped seeing.

Source: Edward de Bono, Po: Beyond Yes and No (1972) and Serious Creativity (1992).

Workflow

Step 1: Confirm the target

This is the opening of the README. Read the full README on GitHub.

Frequently asked about Provocation

What else does danium publish alongside Provocation?
Provocation is one of 9 skills that DirSkills catalogs from danium/lateral-thinking, the repository it ships in. Its siblings there include Assumption Inversion, Concept Fan and Forced Analogy. Each one is a separate skill with its own page in this directory, installs the same way Provocation does, and is maintained by danium in that same repository. The rest of the collection is listed on the danium/lateral-thinking page.
How does Provocation compare to other AI Engineering skills?
Provocation ranks #2221 by stars among the 2451 AI Engineering skills in this catalog. The most-starred ones next to it are Architecture Decision Records, AI-First Engineering and Agentic OS. DirSkills ranks by the star count of the repository each skill ships in, so that order reflects how popular those repositories are rather than any review of Provocation against them. Open each page to compare what they document and how they install.