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optional-skills/creative/creative-ideation/references/methods/lateral-provocations.md

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+# Lateral Provocations
+
+Edward de Bono, 1967–. The PO operator and five provocation moves for breaking pattern lock-in. PO is a linguistic marker that flags a statement as a deliberate provocation, not a claim — to be taken seriously even when implausible.
+
+## When to use
+
+- Idea is too safe / too obvious
+- Variations are all minor rephrasings of the same core
+- Suspect a hidden assumption is constraining the search
+- Group with low psychological safety needs permission to say wrong things
+
+## Don't use when
+
+- Disciplined development of an existing idea (provocations interrupt)
+- Engineering safety / legal / medical (provocations are exploratory)
+- Group will dismiss the provocation rather than engage
+
+## The five operators
+
+**1. Escape (negation).** Take something normally true of the system; negate it.
+- Po: restaurants do not serve food.
+- Po: code review does not happen before merge.
+- Po: the meeting has no agenda.
+
+**2. Reversal.** Reverse a relationship.
+- Po: the patient operates on the surgeon.
+- Po: the listener composes the song.
+- Po: the readers write the book.
+
+**3. Exaggeration.** Push a parameter to extreme.
+- Po: the meeting has 1000 attendees.
+- Po: the novel has one sentence.
+- Po: the company has one customer.
+
+**4. Distortion.** Change order, location, or relationship of components.
+- Po: customers pay before they're born.
+- Po: the recipe lists ingredients after the cooking instructions.
+- Po: revenue arrives the year before expenses.
+
+**5. Wishful thinking.** State an impossible outcome.
+- Po: the medication cures before the patient is sick.
+- Po: the software ships without bugs.
+- Po: the painting paints itself.
+
+## Random-word technique
+
+1. Pick a random noun (dictionary at random page; or list of 1000 nouns + random index).
+2. List 5 connections between the random word and your problem, however tenuous.
+3. Use the strongest.
+
+Example. Problem: my CLI is hard to discover. Random word: "lighthouse".
+- Lighthouses are visible from far; my CLI's affordances are not visible at all.
+- Lighthouses are lit at the right time; my CLI's help is always on, never contextual.
+- Lighthouses signal *danger*; my CLI doesn't signal when an action is irreversible. ← strongest
+- Lighthouse keepers signal back; mine has no two-way contact.
+- Lighthouses are passive; the ship approaches them.
+
+Result: the CLI should signal danger when about to do something irreversible. Concrete, useful, not obvious from inside the original frame.
+
+## Procedure
+
+### Single-PO session
+1. State the problem.
+2. Pick an operator.
+3. Generate a PO statement.
+4. List 5 consequences if the PO statement were true.
+5. Pick the strongest consequence.
+6. Translate into a real proposal.
+
+### Stacked operators
+Two operators on the same problem. Intersection often more interesting than either alone. Example: Escape ("po: meetings don't have agendas") + Reversal ("po: attendees set the agenda after the meeting") → an asynchronous "what we ended up discussing" doc, written collectively after the fact.
+
+## Anti-slop notes
+
+- Generic provocations ("po: things are different") are placeholders, not provocations. Specify what's changed and how.
+- Don't fake "random" word selection. "Innovation" or "synergy" defeats the operator. Use actual random.
+- Don't end at the provocation. The PO statement is means; an actionable proposal is the end.
+- Take the provocation seriously for at least 5 minutes. Dismissing it defeats the operation.
+- Pick the operator deliberately. Different operators surface different things: Escape → purpose; Reversal → relationship; Exaggeration → parameter; Distortion → sequencing; Wishful Thinking → constraint.
+
+Source: de Bono, *Lateral Thinking* (Harper, 1970); *Po: Beyond Yes and No* (Penguin, 1972).