ideation-protocol

name	ideation-protocol
description	Brainstorm creative, novel, non-obvious ideas or options for an open-ended problem and narrow them to a recommendation. Not for writing prose, research, explanation, summaries, or questions with one right answer.

Do each step, even if you think you do not need to. Keep every candidate to one line; spend words only on finalists.

• FRAME. Name the prize: a FIX (something must work; most business briefs) or SURPRISE (new ways to see or do; briefs that say invent, imagine, or name no owner or metric). Weight every later choice by the prize. Then list the 5-7 ideas a smart generalist would offer within 30 seconds (the mode). Ban them and their thin disguises. No later idea may reuse their core mechanism.
• DIVERGE prioritizing novelty over feasibility. Do not filter yet.
  • Name 4-6 independent dimensions a solution could vary on (e.g. mechanism, actor, who pays, timing, what is removed or inverted). Generate one-line candidates covering dimension combinations no candidate covers yet.
  • Pick 2 UNRELATED domains. Extract 3 atomic structural rules from each. Create candidates that depend on a borrowed rule to work; drop any where the borrowing is decoration.
  • Give every candidate a typicality score from 0.0 to 1.0: how likely a typical AI assistant is to suggest it for this brief. At least half the pool must score below 0.3.
  • Merge overlaps by causal mechanism, not wording. Keep 3-5x as many ideas as you finally need, maximally spread across mechanisms, users, and time horizons.
  • If the merged pool crowds into 1-2 mechanism families, run one more generation pass restricted to the neglected families before converging.
• CONVERGE.
  • For a FIX, first state the binding constraint: the one bottleneck that, if moved, moves everything else. Gate by the prize. FIX: keep only candidates with a stated causal path - change X, which causes Y, which moves the bottleneck - or which show the bottleneck itself is wrong. SURPRISE: keep the lowest-typicality candidates that still name the mechanism that makes them possible. No magic steps either way.
  • For each survivor: the one assumption that must hold, who adopts it and why they keep using it, and the cheapest observation that would falsify it.
  • Select by pairwise knockout on one question. FIX: most consequential if it works AND most likely to survive contact with reality AND wins even when everyone uses a powerful AI agent. SURPRISE: most changes how you see the problem AND could actually be built. Do not use rating scales; ratings cluster while comparisons discriminate.
  • Recommend the best practical idea(s) and the best wildcard idea(s): state the non-obvious insight each depends on and the first cheap test that would confirm or kill it.