@medicine-wheel/creative-orientation

Before the work, one question:

Is there a prior state you are restoring?

Yes, and you can name it. This is a fire. Route to @medicine-wheel/gap-analysis — evidenced baseline, observation, difference, verifiable steps.

No, nothing existed that you are returning to. You are creating. Route to structural tension — the outcome named as a state that will exist, held against current reality.

Looking for creative problem solving? It lands here first, then goes one way or the other. The package that carries that name (@medicine-wheel/creative-problem-solving) is a signpost pointing at this one.

[!WARNING] Experimental alpha. Part of the Medicine Wheel Developer Suite, which is under active development. APIs change between patch versions and all packages move in lockstep — pin exact versions. See ALPHA.md.

Why it exists

Problem-solving is not the degraded case. It is the correct case for a specific situation: something worked, it stopped working, restore it. Creating is correct for a different one: bring into being a state that has never existed.

They produce different structures. Problem-solving oscillates back to a baseline — which is exactly right when you are below the baseline. Creating advances toward an outcome. Using the wrong one is how rigorous work goes in circles: chart an oscillating goal and you build a very careful machine for returning to where you started.

This package answers the routing question and nothing else.

The discriminator

A feeling of urgency is not evidence. Under pressure every situation feels like a fire. One question separates them:

Is there a prior state you are restoring?

If you can name it and it genuinely existed — fire. Gap analysis is the right instrument. If you cannot, you are creating, and difference-closing language will mislead you, because there is no baseline to close toward.

Usage

import { readOrientation, worthSaying } from '@medicine-wheel/creative-orientation';

const reading = readOrientation({
  outcome: 'catch cross-service contract breaks',
  restores: null,
});

reading.orientation;      // 'advancing'
reading.route;            // 'structural-tension'
worthSaying(reading);     // true — the phrasing and the situation disagree
reading.advice;
// "This outcome is phrased as removing something, but nothing is being
//  restored. Elimination framing here optimises against a list of known
//  failures rather than toward the state you actually want."

The baseline claim decides the route. Vocabulary only ever contributes signals, because reduce latency is a correct outcome during an incident and a symptom worth surfacing as a product vision. A blocklist would be wrong in precisely the situation where that vocabulary is right.

It advises; it does not refuse

Nothing here blocks a caller. A package that refuses is a package people learn to route around, and routing around it teaches nothing. The reading is returned, the disagreement is named, and the caller proceeds — because sometimes the caller knows something the check does not.

Where it sits

creative-orientation ......... the gate
    ├── gap-analysis ......... the fire path
    └── structural-tension ... the advancing path

@medicine-wheel/brainstorming calls this on every outcome statement it emits, including its own questions. That is the load-bearing use: an elimination-shaped option label, once selected by a human, stops looking like an agent's bias and starts looking like a requirement.

Status

First release. The surface is small on purpose — the judgement of whether a claimed baseline is real stays with a person, and everything around that socket is deterministic so it can be tested and cannot be forgotten under load.

License

MIT