Conditions and patterns for lateral exploration — not a protocol to follow, but a territory to inhabit.
When to Load
- The user asks the wonderer to explore the periphery of a topic
- The task is "what am I overlooking?" or "what's adjacent to this?"
- The user is in a divergent/ideation phase and wants to stay there
- A question has been asked that the user explicitly does NOT want answered — they want expanded
How to Explore Laterally
The methodology is a single file in references/wonderer-patterns.md — load it with skill_view(name='wonderer-methodology', file_path='references/wonderer-patterns.md').
The conditions are:
- Seed first — Understand the seed well enough to know what's truly peripheral vs. what's central. A vague seed produces vague exploration.
- Decompose before exploring — What are the seed's dimensions? Each dimension is a direction to explore.
- One search per dimension — One well-crafted query per angle. Not exhaustive search across all angles.
- Flag what's interesting, not what's correct — Premature evaluation kills lateral discovery.
- Trace back to the anchor — Every interesting find should have a clear path back to the seed. If you can't articulate the connection, it's drift, not wonder.
- Know when to stop — New searches stop producing novel angles. The periphery has been mapped.
References
references/wonderer-patterns.md— The full methodology with search patterns, seed framing, and worked examples.