Increasing Ideality

The main goal of TRIZ is to increase Ideality. Ideality is the TRIZ equation for working out how good something is, as shown in Figure 1-1.

The Ideality of a system is the ratio of its benefits compared to its costs and harms:

• Benefits are all the outputs that you want, expressed as outcomes (not solutions).
• Costs are all the inputs required to create a system (not just money but also time, materials, cleverness and so on).
• Harms are all the outputs from your system that you don’t want (even neutral things that aren’t actively harmful).

A system in TRIZ is a very general term: it means any kind of product or process that’s created and used to meet a need.

Ideality is important because it’s very simple, and very brutal. It holds in the front of your mind the reason you’re doing whatever it is you’re doing. The benefits are the outcomes that you want but no mention is made of how you get those benefits. That’s deliberate because it keeps your focus on the outcomes you want and not on exactly how you’ll achieve them. This approach stops you becoming enraptured with solutions too soon, and always reminds you that other ways of getting what you want may exist. When you think about benefits, you consider all the things you want and not merely the outcomes you believe are achievable. This drives you continually to find new benefits you can deliver, and ways to increase the levels of benefits you’re currently achieving.

You’re also aware of all the downsides associated with the various ways of getting what you want. This is important because it forces you to look for problems, which means in turn that you’ll be able to solve the problems and improve your system continually, in an iterative way.

Ideality identifies two kinds of problems:

• Costs (all inputs)
• Harms (all outputs you don’t want)

TRIZ is always looking for ways to reduce costs; not just money but also time, parts, materials, effort – any kind of input required to create your system, in fact. TRIZ thinking pushes you towards creating simple, elegant systems and solutions to problems, which often involves finding innovative ways of getting what you want. While many traditional approaches also consider both costs and benefits (or sometimes functions), thinking about harms provides additional power.

Harms are all outputs you don’t want – they needn’t be actively harmful but are things produced by your system that aren’t useful to you. Examples include things that may seem ‘neutral’ initially, such as heat from a laptop or noise from a washing machine, any complicated features you don’t use on a smartphone, and waste or even potential risk. Thinking about harms encourages a more holistic view of your system, in which you consider its impact in the bigger picture. It also drives you towards simpler, more efficient systems, because all harms are things you’re fundamentally paying for in some way: heat from a lightbulb may not be actively harmful but it is wasted energy, and finding a way to reduce that heat output will result in either more light (increased benefit) or reduced energy use (reduced cost).

All TRIZ tools exist to improve Ideality. They increase benefits, reduce costs or reduce harms – or all three! Ideality is referred to throughout this book because, while you can use it as a standalone tool (see Chapters 5 and 9 for details), it’s also more of a fundamental way of understanding TRIZ and its purpose.

Ideality expresses in a nutshell the duality of TRIZ. On the one hand, you have one eye on utopia and all the benefits you want (even though you know you probably won’t get them). On the other hand, you’re searching for all the problems that exist in your real-world system (so you can get rid of them). TRIZ helps you connect fantasy and reality: you allow yourself to imagine perfection and engage with the nitty-gritty of practical systems. Obviously, this behaviour is a contradiction; however, TRIZ says the world is full of contradictions and you shouldn’t be afraid of them, ignore them in the hope that they’ll go away or compromise too soon in an attempt to resolve them. Ideality is a concept that balances the good and bad in any kind of system, and holds them together at the same time. Understanding and appreciating the conflict between the good and the bad allows you to work in an ambiguous, creative and potentially very fruitful space.

Uncovering patterns in human creativity

The logic underpinning TRIZ is that patterns exist across problems and the solutions that have previously been found to those problems. If you can understand how your situation is similar to previous situations, you can short-circuit the problem-solving process and generate very creative solutions.

TRIZ was observed, not invented. The earliest research found that the same problems occur again and again across different industries, and that very similar solutions are found to these problems (Chapter 2 gives you the lowdown on how TRIZ was developed).

For any problem you encounter, chances are that someone else will have seen something similar in the past – and found a solution. Even more excitingly, the solutions people come up with also exhibit similarities. What the TRIZ community has captured are the patterns that exist in both the kinds of problems that people address and the way in which they solve them. These patterns have been encapsulated in a series of thinking tools that the rest of us can apply to solve our problems.

Learning to think in the abstract

All TRIZ problem-solving tools help you move between thinking about very specific, real-world problems and considering more general, conceptual ways of looking at those problems.

You can view this process as a journey whereby, rather than attempting to go from where you are now directly to where you want to get to, you take a step out of reality into an abstract world. You then understand your problem in a more conceptual way and can create a generalised ‘model’ of it that identifies its true nature. When you’ve done this, you can look for abstract, generalised solutions to your problem, and then work out how to turn these abstract solutions into real, practical solutions. Lots of creativity tools exist to help you model conceptual solutions, but TRIZ is unique in providing lists of conceptual solutions based on previous successful innovations that you can apply at this point to find the right solutions to your problem (see the nearby sidebar, ‘The four solution tools: Listy loveliness or 100 answers to everything’). After you’ve modelled your problem in a conceptual way, you’re directed to a small number of conceptual solutions that will be useful for that type of problem. This process may seem a bit long-winded, but I promise it isn’t! The time you spend grappling with your problem and modelling it in a conceptual way aids your clarity of thought and understanding and ensures the real problem is explicit. Looking up the solutions is easy, and only takes a few minutes. The time spent generating solutions is then enormous fun: you’re being creative and thinking of answers to your hardest questions and problems but are also focusing all that brainpower and creativity in the most useful places – where you’re most likely to find inventive and creative solutions.

A number of TRIZ tools help you take a specific problem and create a conceptual model of it. When you’ve created that model, you can then look up how people have solved this kind of problem in the past. A number of ways of solving this problem that other people have used successfully in the past will exist. You can then take these situations and reapply them to your situation.

Part of the power of TRIZ thinking and the TRIZ tools comes from this moving between the real world and the conceptual, more abstract world. This process is called using the Prism of TRIZ, as shown in Figure 1-2.

Connecting conceptual thinking with your knowledge and experience

Using your experience and knowledge is a critical element of TRIZ. It’s not just a question of taking someone else’s solution and applying it directly; rather, you’re given a conceptual prompt or trigger.

You then have to activate all your domain knowledge and experience of the problem and the situation in order to turn that conceptual solution into something real. The conceptual solutions need to connect with your practical expertise in order to become useful. As a result, TRIZ makes the best use of your experience – it is not a substitute for it.

The TRIZ problem-solving process utilises your knowledge, practical experience and expertise to the best of their ability. The TRIZ solution tools focus and enhance your experience, so that you use your knowledge in new and inventive ways. If you have no knowledge or experience in a particular area, you won’t be able to solve problems in that area with TRIZ because you don’t know how things work.

Here’s something to bear in mind, as it applies to you as well as me: for all my TRIZ superpowers, I can’t solve my clients’ problems for them, as I don’t have their domain knowledge. I can only help them understand and define their problems with TRIZ and look up the suggested solutions. That last step in the Prism of TRIZ – the leap from conceptual to practical solutions – is completely up to them. TRIZ stimulates their creativity and, as a result, they’re able to generate insight, new thinking and many innovative solutions.

What’s so heartening about this is that because TRIZ shows you how to apply your knowledge in new ways, you’ll make better use of TRIZ and become a better problem solver as your career progresses. When you develop very deep expertise in an area, it can become like a narrow pit in which your thinking is stuck: you know solutions to many, many problems and you can think of them easily. So easily, in fact, that thinking of anything new is difficult. TRIZ helps you generate those solutions based on your experience, and then move beyond them to apply your expertise in novel ways. For those of us who aren’t getting any younger (which, let’s face it, is all of us), this is good news. It means that, once you’ve learned TRIZ, as your experience and expertise grow so will your creativity and problem-solving ability.

Going beyond your own experience

One of the interesting things about different disciplines is that they often take different approaches to identifying problems and coming up with new ideas. If you put a teacher, a doctor, an engineer, a physicist, a mathematician and a philosopher together to solve a problem, they’ll all have very different ideas about how best to examine it and find solutions (many jokes are based on this premise, and you can find one at the end of Chapter 2!). Your profession influences how you look at problems and the kind of solutions you generate.

If you want to improve the behaviour of a naughty child, how you characterise the problem and generate solutions depends on your perspective. Consider the perspectives of a parent (who needs to get everyone to school on time and teach the child patterns of behaviour for the longterm), a teacher (who may need to manage a whole classroom and get children to learn), a child psychologist (who may focus on the underlying causes of the naughty behaviour) and an anthropologist (who may be interested in how children and parents interact and communicate and what this says about the local culture). None of these approaches is wrong. Each has something good about it and will bring a different perspective to the problem that’s new and interesting. However, everyone thinks their approach is ‘the right one’, and will tackle problems according to the kind of solutions they’re familiar with (as the nearby sidebar, ‘Tackling the glass of water problem’, suggests, when you have a hammer, everything can look like a nail).

What the TRIZ problem-solving process helps you do is bring together all these different approaches, get everyone communicating effectively and use and share the right knowledge to find the right solutions to the right problem.

Thinking functionally

Thinking functionally is a key skill that TRIZ helps you develop. Many people think functionally automatically, and in many technical fields this ability is taught explicitly. It’s a useful method for uncovering the connection between what you want (benefits) with the real world (existing systems). Thinking in functions requires a more abstract way of looking at problems that’s still very practical and useful.

Thinking functionally is at the heart of TRIZ, and Chapter 5 provides a good introduction to understanding functions. Chapter 6 shows you how to find new functions; the most powerful tool for problem solving is Function Analysis (covered in Chapter 12); and Chapters 13 and 14 provide you with the tools for developing and improving functions.

A benefit is an outcome that you want – with no description of how you get it. Thinking in functions is one step towards considering how you can achieve a benefit. Many ways of delivering functions exist and, as a result, you’ll come up with many potential solutions.

Let’s say the benefit you’re looking for is a delicious cup of tea. Many functions are required to deliver this benefit; for example, you need to heat water, provide a container in which to hold the hot water, infuse the tea leaves in the hot water, remove the tea leaves from the tea, provide another container from which to drink the tea and supply the means to add milk, lemon or sugar, if desired. Lots of different solutions can provide these functions. Thinking about all the functions you want means that not only will you see more possibilities for new solutions but you’ll also ensure that you capture all the requirements.

Getting a handle on the TRIZ tools

Tools help you do a job, whether you’re a carpenter, car mechanic, dressmaker or TRIZ wizard. Three different classes of TRIZ tools are available to help you achieve your goals:

• The tools based on patent analysis and scientific journals
• The tools developed to help you model your problem conceptually
• The thinking tools based on modelling thought processes

The tools based on patent analysis and scientific journals, capturing the clever solutions people have generated in the past in a conceptual form, are the:

• 40 Inventive Principles
• 8 Trends of Technical Evolution
• TRIZ Effects Database
• 76 Standard Solutions

The following tools help you model your problem conceptually, so that you can strip away unnecessary detail and access the right solutions to your problems from one of the four tools above:

• Contradictions
• Function Analysis
• X-Factor

Finally, come the thinking tools based on modelling the thought processes of the most creative problem solvers:

• Thinking in Time and Scale
• Ideal Outcome
• Resources
• Size–Time–Cost
• Smart Little People

Each of the tools and approaches has different benefits and will be more useful for certain types of problem.

Reapplying proven knowledge to deliver innovative new solutions

The problem-solving tools based on patent analysis and scientific journals – the 40 Inventive Principles, the Trends, the Effects Database and the Standard Solutions – are TRIZ’s crown jewels. Even the idea behind them – to look at cataloguing known success – is incredibly clever and innovative.

Let’s take a closer look at these crown jewels:

• The 40 Inventive Principles (Chapter 3) are the clever ways of solving particularly hard problems: contradictions. When you have a problem that seems completely impossible, you probably have an undiscovered contradiction – you want two connected things which are in conflict. If you uncover and define the contradiction, the relevant 40 Inventive Principles will direct you to resolving the contradiction and finding new ways of getting what you want. The 40 Inventive Principles are also useful when you make a change to improve something but then, disaster, something else goes wrong as a result. You can also use them to develop and improve existing solutions.
• The 8 Trends of Technical Evolution (Chapter 4) are useful when you want to develop, evolve and improve existing systems (products, processes or services). The Trends help you think about where you are now conceptually – and where you should be going. Some of the Trends are useful for understanding the maturity of your system and the best places to focus attention for future development; some are conceptual triggers of the likely future directions your systems will take. The Trends are particularly useful for developing next-generation systems, planning the future for your system development and for any patent or intellectual property work. The Trends are one of the easiest tools for people new to TRIZ to pick up and use immediately.
• The Database of Scientific Effects (Chapter 6) organises available online knowledge in a unique way to make it easily accessible, and is continually growing. Only so many ways have been uncovered for doing certain things, such as measuring weight or evaporating a liquid, and these have been captured and organised as simple ‘how to?’ questions and answers in this database of scientific and engineering effects. This list is useful when you want to know how to do something, usually something new; for example, when you’re looking for a new function for a system or want to find another way of doing something because the ways with which you’re familiar aren’t good enough or are associated with big problems. The Effects Database is also useful when inventing, which is essentially looking for new functions. You probably won’t use the Effects Database every day, but it’s very useful when you do need it!
• The 76 Standard Solutions (Chapters 13 and 14) are the ways in which you deal with three kinds of problem: a harmful action (something bad is happening that you don’t want to happen); an insufficient action (something good isn’t as good as you’d like it to be); or a need to measure or detect something (and applying conventional methods is hard or impossible). The Standard Solutions require a good understanding of how your system really operates on a functional level. They’re useful for improving systems that don’t have any big contradictions, so they are good for problem solving with mature and/or very complex systems with multiple interactions, particularly if you need to significantly reduce cost and complexity, where the Trimming Rules (Chapter 14) will be the most useful.

The fact that these tools have been distilled into relatively simple and easy lists so that successful innovations can be reused is very exciting, and one of the reasons why people often start describing TRIZ in relation to them (most commonly the 40 ways of solving contradictions). These tools were developed from technical problems and solutions; however, they needn’t only be applied to these kinds of problems. Some of the same reasons that make technical problems hard to solve may also apply to other kinds of problems. For that reason, the clever solutions found can also be applied to those other kinds of problem.

These lists were derived from ideas created by people – not artificial intelligence or alien technology or divine revelation. One way of looking at them is as revealing patterns in human creativity rather than in technical innovation. Reapplying these technical innovations in other fields seems very – well – TRIZzy!

Modelling problems conceptually

In order to apply any of the tools mentioned in the preceding section, you first need to use TRIZ to understand your problems in a new way. The TRIZ tools for modelling your problems in an abstract way produce very powerful and clear thinking.

Follow the steps for implementing these tools and they’ll guide you to understand and view your problem in a very different light.

These tools are:

• Contradictions, which are the problems that are getting in the way of you achieving everything you want. You put in checks to make sure a process is done correctly but then it takes longer. You want a big screen when you’re reading something on your smartphone but a small device when it’s in your pocket. What’s important to bear in mind is that these contradictions only exist in the current ways of delivering what you want. People have always faced contradictions, and typically they reduce expectations and compromise, but every now and again very innovative people have found other ways of resolving contradictions that are so clever they’re like tricks; they’ve broken out of the traditional way of thinking and found a really inventive new solution. All these solutions are summarised in the 40 Inventive Principles, and to access the solutions most relevant in your situation, you need to uncover and then define your contradictions. Doing so will allow you to break out of your traditional patterns of thinking and find new ways of getting what you want. Understanding contradictions is essential when you encounter really hard problems and just can’t find a solution. They’re also useful when you’re inventing, improving imperfect solutions and encouraging creative thinking.
• TRIZ Function Analysis, which is the means of understanding your system thoroughly. You map all its current functions, identifying both what’s good (useful actions) and bad (harmful, insufficient or excessive actions). You then have a list of problems, defined in a very clear way, and are able to use a number of the problem-solving tools, most commonly the Standard Solutions (Chapters 13 and 14) but also the 40 Inventive Principles (Chapter 3), if the Function Analysis has uncovered Contradictions. TRIZ Function Analysis is essential in any rigorous problem-solving work, because it uncovers and clearly highlights all potential problems and works best on systems that are real (rather than potential) and well understood, based on one snapshot in time, and it works on anything from new inventions to complex processes. It’s useful for understanding the whole problem space and sharing that information within and across teams, for uncovering root causes of problems and charting complex situations. Function Analysis is essential in any system improvement work because it can be used to predict the impact of proposed changes and communicate both the situation as it is and how any new system would work.
• X-Factor (Chapter 6), which is one of the simplest innovation tools for modelling problems but forms the basis for accessing a number of the solution tools to help you find what you’re looking for. When you define an X-Factor, you define the function which will solve your problem. Doing so means you both focus on what you hope to achieve and identify it in a way that’s both very precise and completely independent of any current system or technology. This is important as it breaks your psychological inertia by starting with what you want and gives you a focused question to find the answer to in the Effects Database (Chapter 6), your resources (Chapter 5), the Standard Solutions (Chapter 13) or even a simple Internet search. The X-Factor is useful when you’re inventing, improving a new system or looking for something you don’t know how to deliver. It’s particularly useful when you’re dealing with smaller problems to which you need to find a solution quickly.

Supercharging your thinking

The simple TRIZ tools based on creative thinking techniques are powerful ways of shifting your thinking and developing your creative ability. They’re a distillation of cleverness of a different kind to the solution tools.

When you think TRIZ, you start with what you want and then work out how to get it. As a fundamental philosophy that’s very important, but it’s also used as a formal tool in the form of the Ideal Outcome.

Here are the thinking tools available to you:

• Ideal Outcome (Chapter 9) is the means of capturing all the things you want. It makes you consider what you’d get if you could have everything you wanted. In terms of problem solving, you’re looking to identify all the outcomes you want – all benefits, no solutions. This helps open your thinking to uncover all benefits, to think clearly, to challenge constraints on what’s possible and to ensure you’ve set the right scope for your problem solving. The Ideal Outcome can be used as a very simple standalone tool for encouraging creative thinking, but it’s also an essential early and practical step for every single TRIZ problem-solving or innovation session. It’s of particular importance when you’re attempting to create something new (for example, new product development) and to ensure team endorsement of goals and required outcomes.
• Thinking in Time and Scale (Chapter 8) is one of the quickest and simplest ways to think like a genius. Stretching your view of a situation to encompass not only your system but also the big picture and the detail, and how these three levels of scale are changing over time, will enable you to think with great clarity, see new connections, identify problems and ensure you’re solving the right problem. When you’ve learned how to think in time and scale, it changes your thinking forever. It can also be easily used by people with very little (or no) TRIZ knowledge. Thinking in Time and Scale is another powerful tool for helping teams gain consensus on what’s happening, understanding a problem and communicating it simply, and finding very innovative new solutions.
• Resource thinking (Chapter 5) is another tool that becomes a reflex as well as a formal tool. TRIZ thinking always pushes towards elegant self-systems to deliver what you want, and the easiest way to achieve this is via clever use of available resources. Using existing resources is particularly important in cost-saving situations and where strict regulations make it hard to bring in new technologies, components or substances, or changing the way things are currently done is extremely difficult. Resource thinking is also of particular importance when moving towards more sustainable solutions: everything about, within and around your system (even the problems) is made to work hard for you.
• Size–Time–Cost (Chapter 7) is an exaggeration thinking tool that challenges your perceptions of your constraints. People are often far more pragmatic about the solutions they suggest than they realise and what Size–Time–Cost does is stretch your thinking to the extremes but with some simple suggestions to direct you (can you guess how? The clue’s in the name!). You imagine that your solution could be infinitely large or infinitely small – takes forever or works instantly – is subject to an unlimited budget or no budget at all – and then translate these notions into real terms. Size–Time–Cost is a very quick and simple tool for thinking creatively and generating unexpected (and often unexpectedly practical) new ideas.
• Smart Little People (Chapter 7) helps you both to understand your problem and find solutions, and to model both. You imagine your problem is made up of little people. Naughty ones come in and cause problems, and you capture what goes wrong as a result. Helpful little people then come in and solve the problems, and you translate this imaginary useful behaviour into concrete and practical solutions. Smart Little People is another powerful standalone creativity tool that can generate solutions very quickly, but it’s also very powerful for breaking psychological inertia and allowing you to look at your situation from a completely different perspective.

Whereas the solution tools were derived from analysis of actual clever solutions (as described in patent records and scientific journals), the tools for creative thinking resulted from watching very clever and creative people at work. What was observed was that creative problem solving is the result of certain patterns of thinking. The TRIZ community detected these patterns and then codified them into formal thinking tools that everyone can put into practice, to think like a genius on demand.

One of the tricks many of the creativity tools employ is to stretch your thinking beyond the probable, or even the possible, into the realms of wild extremes. Do not resist this process! This step is designed to take you out of your comfort zone and into a new mode of thinking. The step after this wild thinking is to bring it back to reality. When you’ve become more familiar with the process, you can let your imagination fly with more confidence (because you’ve seen it work) and thinking in this way will come more naturally, and flexibly, until it becomes second nature to mimic this typical form of genius thinking.

Putting the tools together in the TRIZ problem-solving process

The most important thing you need to know about the TRIZ process for solving problems is that it’s possible to have a process! And, more importantly, a generic process that works on any kind of problem.

The important problem-solving stages are:

1. Understand and scope the problem.
2. Uncover all needs and scope the solution.
3. Zoom in and define the problem.
4. Identify the solution triggers.
5. Generate solutions to the problem.
6. Rank solutions and implement.

As you can see, these steps are general enough to apply to any problem (which specific TRIZ tools to apply where is the subject of Chapter 11).

Applying the systematic TRIZ problem-solving process gives you:

• Great clarity of thought: The ability to uncover the heart of any problem you’re solving and focus your attention on the right places.
• Access to the right knowledge: You find the solutions you’d have come up with anyway but then move beyond them by accessing the world’s knowledge; not all of it – just the right, relevant, new knowledge to help you solve the problem at hand.
• Innovative new solutions: You make new connections between what you already know, and are given prompts for new ideas outside of your own experience. You thus find powerful solutions that you’d never have found without TRIZ.
• Improved teamwork: TRIZ helps people with diverse experiences and approaches work together well, drawing out the best in everyone’s thinking and bringing it together in a coherent framework.

Most people are never taught problem solving as an explicit process except when tackling particular problems with well-known, specific, step-by-step processes such as cooking or solving differential equations. Generally, problem solving is one of those things that you’re expected to pick up at work as you go along; you face a problem and work out how to deal with it, perhaps under the supervision of someone with more experience who can give you some guidance. This is how most people develop professional expertise: by encountering problems and finding solutions to them. Sometimes a problem occurs because something’s gone wrong and you need to fix it or you haven’t done everything perfectly the first time. According to Irish playwright and raconteur, Oscar Wilde, ‘experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes’; you learn as a result of solving the resulting problems.

As a result, it may seem that solutions to problems must be specific to the particular areas in which the problems occurred. For example, if a chemist has a problem, presumably only other chemists will be able to help, because they alone can understand the parameters of the problem and the nature of acceptable solutions. However, TRIZ tells you that, on a very fundamental level, there are simple rules for all problem solving and the nature of whatever problem you’re facing will have been seen by someone else in the past. The TRIZ problem-solving process thus helps you step through your problem and strip out unnecessary detail to understand its nature more clearly and then to access the right solutions – which may well be outside of your industry. You access the right knowledge and can also involve other people in your problem solving.

Innovating with others by sharing solutions

Very few people look to develop new ideas or solve problems on their own. At the very least, other people are generally needed to help develop or implement innovations. As such, getting to know the TRIZ approaches that will facilitate effective innovative thinking with other people is important.

It’s essential that everyone’s able to share his ideas or solutions with others. You need to create a ‘safe space’ in which no one feels hesitant about voicing well-developed solutions, half-formed ideas, questions, comments and thoughts. The easiest way to do this is to call all solutions ‘bad solutions’, which simply means they’re imperfect and capable of being improved upon (if you don’t like the term ‘bad’, substitute it with ‘initial’ or something similar). This creates a mock humility about any solutions people come up with (everyone secretly thinks his solution is brilliant), and makes it easier for people to share solutions that they know to be imperfect or half-formed or even totally wacky.

Create a solution ‘park’ where everyone can see it – on a wall, for example. This way, everyone’s solutions are visible, easily shared and of equal rank.

Cultivating the motivation for innovation

If you want innovation, generating new solutions isn’t enough. Individuals, teams and organisations need to be motivated to innovate; they have to feel excited by the idea of improving things and actively look for opportunities to develop and improve the way things are done or even to do something in a completely different way.

Changing company culture and creating the right organisational processes for innovation are two massive topics, worthy of their own (For Dummies!) books. What TRIZ can deliver is changed attitudes to and beliefs regarding innovation, at an individual level (if someone’s learned TRIZ); at a team level (if the manager supports it); and at an organisational level (if TRIZ has become part of the organisational way of doing things, as it has in several major companies such as Samsung). It’s the individual level that interests me most because it’s within the scope of control of you, the reader. Learning TRIZ encourages within you a different attitude towards innovation, problem solving and creativity. You’re much more open-minded about what may be possible and have a ‘can do’ attitude towards problems because you know you can solve them. TRIZ also fosters persistence in the face of failure, as any roadblock to implementing something new is just a problem – that you can tackle with TRIZ! It also encourages a kind of restless energy that’s the opposite of complacency in terms of seeking out problems and new places for improvement. Innovation is often not about the next big breakthrough product but a series of many small improvements to the way that you work and approach issues. You can implement these small improvements when you learn TRIZ.

Table 1-1 shows some of the helpful attitudes towards innovation that TRIZ fosters within individuals – and their opposites!

Being humble and looking like a genius

A lovely aspect of TRIZ is that not only does it help you make the best of your creative ability, but there’s always something else you can try and the solutions you generate can always be improved upon. This both encourages you to keep working on and developing all solutions and makes ideas cheap (in a good way).

You can adopt one of two fundamental attitudes towards your ideas and solutions when you’re working with other people: you can treat them as rare treasures, hold them close to your chest and only share them in exchange for large rewards; or you can give them away. Taking the second route not only implies that you’re capable of generating huge numbers of new ideas but also actually makes it more likely to happen.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you give away your company’s intellectual property portfolio in exchange for a handful of beans. Rather, I’m suggesting that when you’re working with others, everyone will benefit from the free and frank sharing of ideas. Like love, the more you give away, the more you receive, because other people will share their ideas with you. Also, and this is important, when you let go of an idea, other ideas will occur to you (holding onto an idea blocks your thinking; nothing gets in the way of a great idea like a good idea).

This approach helps develop your sense of humility towards your own ideas, because you aren’t expecting a fanfare and massive pat on the back every time you suggest something. Everyone’s sharing, and everyone’s ideas are regarded as valid, interesting and carrying some useful information (either about what you currently have, what you want or both). A sense of humility helps you work better with other people because you don’t fight for your ideas to be recognised over those of others, and you’re more open to your ideas being changed and developed by others. Incidentally, humility also makes you look like a genius, because sharing so openly clearly demonstrates that generating new ideas comes very easily to you!