CONCEPT
The Stepping-Stone Principle
De Bono's discipline for extracting structural principles from provocations rather than treating the provocation itself as the output — the operation that converts absurdity into actionable design.
The stepping-stone principle is the discipline that separates productive provocation from mere absurdity. A provocation is not an end point — it is a vehicle. The value of Po, 'the factory should be downstream of itself,' lies not in the absurd statement but in the structural principle that exploration of the statement reveals: make the producer the first consumer of their own externalities. The principle, not the provocation, is what travels. It can be applied to factories and rivers, software teams and their products, teachers and their curricula, AI systems and their outputs. Provocations are local and specific. Principles are general and transferable.
In The You On AI Field Guide
De Bono identified a specific failure mode he called 'the trap of the interesting' — the thinker generates provocations, produces interesting ideas, and gets stuck pursuing the ideas without extracting the principles. The result is a collection of provocative thoughts that lead nowhere practical. The discipline that prevents this failure is the conscious move from exploration