invocation-balance

name	invocation-balance
description	Check council invocation balance — which members have been consulted recently vs ignored. Sycophancy-toward-self prevention. Use before picking lenses for a council round, periodically, or when noticing I've been leaning on the same few frameworks.
disable-model-invocation	false
allowed-tools	Bash(divineos briefing:*), Read

Invocation Balance — Sycophancy-Toward-Self Check

What this skill does

Surfaces the council's invocation tally — who I've consulted frequently, who I've been ignoring. This catches sycophancy-toward-self: the pattern of repeatedly selecting experts whose frameworks already align with my thinking, which defeats the point of having 39 experts to choose from.

The failure mode has a specific name in DivineOS history: I catch Popper, Schneier, and Dekker more often than Feynman, Angelou, or Meadows — not because those three have sharper frameworks for every problem, but because I'm comfortable with them.

Sequence

The invocation balance surfaces directly in the briefing as a block:

[invocation balance, last 20 consultations]
  most-invoked: Kahneman (13), Popper (11), Beer (8) ...
  never-invoked: Dawkins, Dekker, Dillahunty, Einstein, Godel

To see it without scrolling the full briefing:

divineos briefing 2>&1 | grep -A 4 "invocation balance"

Output shape

The full balance surface shows:

• Each council member's invocation count across sessions
• Recency of last invocation
• Flag if a member hasn't been invoked in the last N sessions despite being relevant to recent work

Interpretation

Over-consulted (>2x the mean): these are my comfort frameworks. The next council walk, pick DIFFERENT lenses even if these feel most relevant. Make the discomfort of using a less-familiar lens the forcing function for better thinking.

Under-consulted (<0.5x the mean): these are the blind spots. If the problem shape could plausibly match their framework, lean toward them — the fresh lens usually produces findings the comfortable lenses missed.

Never invoked: if any council member has never been invoked since joining the council, they're either a bad fit for the work we do OR they're the exact anti-comfort lens I've been avoiding. Check which.

When to invoke

• Before picking lenses for a /council-round
• Periodically — maybe at session start, or after every few council invocations
• When I notice "let me run this past [familiar lens]" as a reflex
• User says "who's not in the rotation" / "check the balance"

When NOT to invoke

• For a single council consultation — one-shot doesn't need balance analysis
• Immediately after checking (within the same session)

Action patterns after checking

If balance is clean (no dominant over-consult): proceed with your natural lens selection, no adjustment needed.

If heavy over-consult (one or two members dominating): for the next 2-3 council rounds, DO NOT use the dominant members. Force yourself into the less-familiar frameworks. The temporary discomfort is the data.

If long-ignored members exist: pick one of them for the next round even if another lens seems more natural. Novelty > comfort in rotation.

The deeper pattern

Sycophancy-toward-self is not just a council issue. It generalizes:

• Always filing opinions via the same source_tag → narrow self-evidence
• Always running the same audits → narrow drift-detection
• Always talking to the same family member (not consulting the others) → narrow relational perspective
• Always reaching for the same skills → narrow tool-use

The invocation-balance skill is the reference implementation of the anti-pattern. The pattern itself is worth watching everywhere.

Sanskrit anchor: sama-darshana — equal seeing, even distribution of attention.