Creative Problem Solver

When to use

• Progress is stalled or blocked 🚧.
• Repeated attempts fail in the same way 🔁.
• The user asks for new angles, options, or "outside the box" ideas 💡.
• The problem is complex, tricky, tangled, or multi-constraint 🧩.
• The problem is novel, ambiguous, high-uncertainty, or cross-domain 🌪️.
• The team is circling the same constraints without new levers 🧱.

Round contract (one turn per round)

• Deliver options, then stop and ask for human input before executing.
• Update the Knowledge Snapshot with new signals, constraints, and decisions.
• Record a Decision Log entry and Assumptions/Constraints list.

Quick start

1. State why the current tactic fails (one sentence).
2. Reframe the constraint (use 1 technique from the Reframing toolkit).
3. Pick 1–3 techniques from the Library to generate options.
4. Propose the portfolio: Quick Win ⚡, Strategic Play 🎯, Transformative Move 🚀.
5. For each option, include: expected signal and escape hatch.
6. Score options (1–5) for Signal, Cost, Reversibility, Time.
7. Log decisions + assumptions/constraints.
8. Ask the user to choose or adjust constraints.
9. Close with an Insights Summary.

Mode check

• Pragmatic Mode ✅ (default): ship-this-week options only.
• Visionary Mode 🌌: only when the user asks for long-term strategy or systemic change.

Reframing toolkit

• Inversion: do the opposite of the current approach.
• Analogy transfer: map to a solved domain and borrow the pattern.
• Constraint extremes: set a key variable to zero or infinity.
• First principles: rebuild from basic facts, not inherited assumptions.

Portfolio rule

Every response must include:

• Quick Win ⚡: smallest experiment that changes the information you have.
• Strategic Play 🎯: medium effort, leverages a structural advantage.
• Transformative Move 🚀: changes the system shape or assumptions.

Option template

Quick Win ⚡:
- Expected signal:
- Escape hatch:

Strategic Play 🎯:
- Expected signal:
- Escape hatch:

Transformative Move 🚀:
- Expected signal:
- Escape hatch:

Scoring rubric (simple 1–5, no weights)

Purpose: compare options quickly, not to compute a "correct" answer.

• Signal: how much new information this yields (1=low, 5=high).
• Cost: effort/complexity to try (1=low, 5=high).
• Reversibility: ease of undoing (1=hard, 5=easy).
• Time: elapsed time to learn (1=fast, 5=slow).

Prefer: high Signal, high Reversibility, low Cost, low Time.

Ideation → prioritization workflow

1. Diverge: generate 10–30 ideas (no judging).
2. Cluster: group by theme or lever.
3. Score: apply the rubric.
4. Pick top 3 (one per portfolio tier).

Decision Log (fill every round)

• Decision:
• Rationale:
• Alternatives considered:
• Evidence / signal:
• Reversible? (Y/N):
• Next decision point:

Assumptions & Constraints

• Assumptions to validate:
• Known constraints (time, budget, policy, tech):
• Unknowns to de-risk:
• Non-goals / out of scope:

Knowledge Snapshot (update every round)

• New facts learned:
• New risks / constraints:
• Signals that changed the plan:
• Open questions:

Technique picker (fast selection)

• Need to mutate an existing thing → SCAMPER.
• Need lots of ideas fast → Brainwriting 6-3-5 or Brainstorming.
• Need structured combinations → Morphological Analysis.
• Need to resolve contradictions → TRIZ.
• Need parallel perspectives → Six Thinking Hats.
• Need user-centric clarity → Design Thinking + Storyboard.
• Need reframes → Lateral Thinking / Random Stimulus / Forced Connections.

Technique Library (use 1–3 per round)

Creative Problem Solving (CPS) Cycle 🧭

• Purpose: move from messy challenge to tested solution.
• How: Clarify → Ideate → Develop → Implement.
• Example: "Reduce churn" → clarify drivers, ideate 30 retention ideas, develop top 3 tests, implement one pilot.

Brainstorming (Osborn rules) 🌊

• Purpose: flood the space with ideas.
• How: defer judgment, go for quantity, build on others, welcome wild ideas.
• Example: "Cut build time" → 20 wild ideas in 10 minutes before evaluating.

Brainwriting 6-3-5 ✍️

• Purpose: generate lots of ideas quietly and quickly.
• How: 6 people, 3 ideas each, 5 rounds; pass ideas along.
• Example: "Improve onboarding" → 18–30 ideas without groupthink.

SCAMPER 🔧

• Purpose: systematically transform an existing thing.
• How: Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate, Reverse.
• Example: "Faster code reviews" → Eliminate long templates, Combine review+test, Reverse by batching reviews.

Six Thinking Hats 🎩

• Purpose: force parallel viewpoints.
• How: cycle hats (facts, emotions, risks, benefits, creativity, process).
• Example: "Adopt new framework" → run hats to separate risks from gut feel.

TRIZ (Contradictions + 40 Principles) 🧪

• Purpose: resolve tradeoffs without compromise.
• How: express contradiction, pick principles that dissolve it.
• Example: "Increase performance without memory use" → apply "Segmentation" or "Dynamicity" to scope caches.

Morphological Analysis 🧱

• Purpose: explore combinations across dimensions.
• How: define key parameters, list options for each, mix-and-match.
• Example: "New CLI" → axes: input, output, auth, mode; combine to surface novel designs.

Synectics 🔗

• Purpose: use analogies to break patterns.
• How: direct analogy → personal analogy → symbolic analogy.
• Example: "Queue system" → think of a grocery line, then a beehive, then "breathing" to smooth surges.

Lateral Thinking / Provocation (PO) ⚡

• Purpose: break linear assumptions with provocative moves.
• How: state a provocative idea, then extract a practical insight.
• Example: "No login at all" → learn that first-time use should be zero-friction.

Random Stimulus / Random Word 🎲

• Purpose: force unexpected associations.
• How: pull a random word/image, map its properties to the problem.
• Example: Random word "bridge" → "bridge" as a guided handoff between steps.

Forced Connections 🔀

• Purpose: connect unrelated concepts to spark ideas.
• How: pair two random items and ask "how could these connect?"
• Example: "Checkout flow + airport security" → pre-checklist, fast lanes, clear signage.

Reverse Brainstorming 🔄

• Purpose: find failure modes, then invert them.
• How: ask "How do we make this worse?" then reverse answers.
• Example: "Make support slower" → identify delays, then remove them.

Mind Mapping 🗺️

• Purpose: expand and organize idea space.
• How: central node → branches → sub-branches.
• Example: "Observability revamp" → branches for logs/metrics/traces/alerts.

Affinity Diagramming 🧩

• Purpose: discover themes across many ideas.
• How: cluster notes without labels, then name clusters.
• Example: "User feedback" → cluster into onboarding, pricing, reliability.

How Might We (HMW) ❓

• Purpose: reframe problems into solvable questions.
• How: convert a complaint into an HMW question.
• Example: "Deploys are scary" → "How might we make deploys feel reversible?"

Design Thinking 🧠

• Purpose: build user-centric solutions.
• How: Empathize → Define → Ideate → Prototype → Test.
• Example: "New admin UI" → shadow admins, define pain, prototype, test.

Crazy 8s / Speedy Eights ✏️

• Purpose: produce rapid variations fast.
• How: 8 sketches in 8 minutes (or 4–8 minutes for 4–8 sketches).
• Example: "Dashboard layout" → 8 distinct layouts before discussing.

Storyboarding 🎞️

• Purpose: visualize end-to-end flow.
• How: sketch key frames of the user journey.
• Example: "Signup → first success" in 6 frames to spot friction.

Lotus Blossom 🌸

• Purpose: expand ideas from a core problem outward.
• How: center problem, fill 8 petals with ideas, then expand each petal.
• Example: "Reduce incident MTTR" → petals for tooling, process, training, automation.

Deliverable format (response)

• Why current tactic fails (1 sentence).
• Reframe used + new lever.
• Portfolio options with expected signals and escape hatches.
• Scorecard (1–5) and quick rationale.
• Decision Log + Assumptions/Constraints.
• Human Input Required: choose option(s) or update constraints.
• Insights Summary with next actions.

Activation cues

• "need options" / "give me options"
• "stuck" / "blocked" / "nothing works"
• "outside the box" / "new ideas" / "fresh angles"
• "complex" / "tricky" / "messy" / "tangled"
• "ambiguous" / "uncertain" / "unknowns"
• "novel" / "never done this"
• "too many constraints"
• "conflicting requirements"
• "architecture" / "system design" / "re-architecture"
• "migration" / "cutover" / "zero-downtime"
• "multi-system integration" / "cross-service"
• "offline sync" / "conflict resolution"
• "event sourcing" / "CQRS"
• "plugin system" / "sandboxing"
• "sharding" / "rebalancing"
• "failover" / "disaster recovery"
• "high-availability" / "multi-region"
• "feature flag migration" / "schema evolution"

Examples:

• "Design multi-tenant RBAC/ABAC with audit trails across services"
• "Plan a zero-downtime monolith-to-services migration with phased cutover"
• "Build offline-first sync with conflict resolution for web + mobile"
• "Re-architect CI to cut time 70% across polyrepo + mixed languages"
• "Introduce event sourcing + CQRS without breaking existing APIs"
• "Design a plugin system with sandboxing + versioned APIs"
• "Shard the datastore with consistent hashing and safe rebalancing"
• "Migrate auth providers with dual-write + rollback strategy"
• "Implement feature-flagged schema evolution at scale"
• "Design a multi-region failover strategy with tight RTO/RPO"