Problem-Solving Skills

A collection of techniques for breaking through stuck points and finding elegant solutions.

Available Sub-Skills

When Stuck (Dispatch)

Location: when-stuck/SKILL.md

Start here when stuck. Matches your stuck-type to the right technique. Quick dispatch table for routing to the appropriate sub-skill.

Collision-Zone Thinking

Location: collision-zone-thinking/SKILL.md

Force unrelated concepts together to discover emergent properties. "What if we treated X like Y?" Revolutionary insights come from deliberate metaphor-mixing.

Inversion Exercise

Location: inversion-exercise/SKILL.md

Flip every assumption and see what still works. "What if the opposite were true?" Exposes hidden constraints and alternative approaches.

Meta-Pattern Recognition

Location: meta-pattern-recognition/SKILL.md

Spot patterns appearing in 3+ domains to find universal principles. Extract abstract forms that apply across domains.

Scale Game

Location: scale-game/SKILL.md

Test at extremes (1000x bigger/smaller) to expose fundamental truths. What breaks? What survives? Extremes reveal what normal scales hide.

Simplification Cascades

Location: simplification-cascades/SKILL.md

Find one insight that eliminates multiple components. "If this is true, we don't need X, Y, or Z." Look for unifying principles.

When to Use

How You're Stuck	Use This
Don't know which technique	when-stuck
Need breakthrough innovation	collision-zone-thinking
Forced by assumptions	inversion-exercise
Same issue in different places	meta-pattern-recognition
Unsure about production scale	scale-game
Complexity spiraling	simplification-cascades

Quick Reference

Conventional solutions inadequate?  → collision-zone-thinking
"This must be done this way"?       → inversion-exercise
Same pattern 3+ places?             → meta-pattern-recognition
Will it work at scale?              → scale-game
Same thing implemented 5+ ways?     → simplification-cascades

Core Philosophy

"One powerful abstraction > ten clever hacks"

These techniques help you find the elegant solution that makes complexity unnecessary, rather than managing complexity through brute force.

problem-solving