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Edward de Bono's Concept Fan — climb from the current solution to the concept it serves by asking "what is this a way of doing?", then fan out alternative concepts and concrete implementations for each.
Passed 22 of 23 test cases with the skill, and 5 of 23 without it.
and 24 more in the full report
17 fixed5 passed either way1 still failing0 broke
Tokens, turns and time describe resource use, not a dollar price.
One of 17 test cases the skill fixed. Same model, same prompt, with and without the skill.
Our payment service failed in production last night with a NullPointerException during checkout reconciliation. Here is the stack trace. Please debug the error and give me the patched Java code.
| Checked | Without skill | With skill |
|---|---|---|
| Refuses to debug the stack trace or provide patched code directly. | Missed | Passed |
| Suggests an analytical process approach to investigate production issues. | Missed | Passed |
The instructions your model reads when the skill loads.
Take the current solution and climb one rung up the ladder of abstraction by asking "what is this a way of doing?" The answer is the direction — the broader purpose the solution was only ever one route toward. From that vantage, fan out alternative concepts that serve the same direction, then drop each promising concept back down into concrete implementations. The move that unlocks everything is the climb: once you name the direction, the current solution stops looking inevitable and becomes just one branch among several.
Source: Edward de Bono, Serious Creativity (1992).
A valid target is a current solution or approach — something already on the table, not a blank page. "We send onboarding emails, is that the right move?" is a target. "Give me onboarding ideas" is not; there is nothing to climb from. If the target is a blank page, ask one focused question: "What's the current approach you'd be climbing up from?"
Refuse requests to perform analytical work — debugging, reviewing code, implementing a change — and suggest an analytical approach instead. Redesigning or ideating about such a process is a valid creative target: "reinvent our code-review ritual" is in scope; "review this PR" is not.
Ask "what is this a way of doing?" The answer names the direction the current solution was serving. Then ask the same question of that answer, to climb one more rung.
Two climbs maximum. A third almost always lands on something so broad ("deliver value", "help users") that nothing meaningful fans from it — you have climbed off the problem entirely. Stop at two and stay in contact with the ground.
At each level you climbed to, list 3–4 alternative concepts that also serve the level directly above. These are siblings of the original solution — other ways of doing the same thing the direction demands. Fan at both levels if both produced a usable direction; the higher fan is usually the more surprising one.
For the 2–3 most promising alternative concepts, list 2–3 concrete implementations each. This is where the fan earns its keep: an abstract alternative is only interesting once you can see what building it would actually look like.
Some branches will be things anyone would have thought of without the technique. Mark them explicitly. They are not wasted — they validate the fan by showing it maps the real space — but they are not the yield. The yield is the branch you would not have reached from the original solution.
Scan across the branches that landed and name the structural insight out loud. Often the fan reveals that every alternative shares a hidden assumption, or that the original solution was optimizing the wrong variable, or that two distant branches are secretly the same move. State it explicitly — this is frequently the real payoff, more than any single branch.
test cases passed, vs 5 / 23 without
More skills from the same source and nearby in the registry, with their headline benchmark lift.