Picturing TRIZ’s beginnings

TRIZ was the brainchild of Genrich Altshuller (1926–96). Born in the former Soviet Union, he was a naturally very inventive person and as a teenager already had two Soviet equivalents to a patent to his name.

In 1946 Altshuller started work in the Soviet Navy’s patent office and noticed a pattern in the patents he was studying: people tended to come up with very similar solutions to each other, but in different fields or different applications. With Rafael Shapiro, he began researching whether this was the case, and found that the same themes were repeated in particularly inventive solutions (check out the nearby sidebar, ‘Solving contradictions: the definition of an inventive solution’, for more info). Unfortunately for Altshuller, he fell foul of Stalin’s political temper and was arrested, charged with ‘inventor’s sabotage’ (a charge some clients tell me they think still exists in their companies!) and sentenced initially to death, then to 25 years hard labour in a Siberian gulag (to say it was a bad idea to disagree with Stalin is a bit of an understatement). In the gulag, Altshuller was surrounded by other political prisoners, including a lot of engineers and scientists. He discussed his theory with them and started to develop the early TRIZ community, right there and then. In 1953, after Stalin’s death, many political prisoners were released, including Altshuller, Shapiro and other members of that community. They immediately started researching the theory that patterns exist in human creativity.

After analysing 50,000 patents, the early TRIZ community had uncovered 40 ways to resolve contradictions – the 40 Inventive Principles. These principles are very general; for example, they suggest doing things such as breaking an item into different pieces, changing its shape or making parts of it move. The global TRIZ community has continued researching but the number remains at 40 (although fans of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy would like to up it to 42).

The first thing a lot of people new to TRIZ (particularly academics) want to do is find a new Inventive Principle. I’ve seen attempts to introduce new principles – one branch of the TRIZ community has suggested another ten – but these can always be seen as potential sub-sets of existing principles. In my experience, the 40 Principles work – they genuinely help people quickly find clever and inventive answers, and the time people spend uncovering and defining their contradictions results in much clearer problem understanding.

As soon as the 40 Inventive Principles had been uncovered, the TRIZ community started to analyse contradictions and categorise them. They then looked at which Inventive Principles resolved each particular kind of contradiction. As a result, when you face a contradiction, you can look up which of the principles have been used to solve one like it in the past. You can then use those principles to generate your own innovative ideas (see Chapter 3 for more on Contradictions and the 40 Inventive Principles).

After this first, important discovery was made, the TRIZ community continued to analyse problems and solutions to create a knowledge base that, at Altshuller’s insistence, was in the public domain for everyone to use.

Standing on the shoulders of giants – or reinventing the wheel?

Some people start to get a bit worried when they plunge into TRIZ. ‘Hang on a minute,’ they say, ‘I’m really good at solving problems and being creative already. If I’m just reusing other people’s inventions, doesn’t that mean anyone can apply these skills and TRIZ is really boring and simply copying?’

My usual response to this is:

• Yes – everyone can do it! That’s the point. Everyone can be creative – and even the most creative people can learn to be more creative. You’re not relying on a random spark of inspiration or a stereotypical ‘creative person’ with mad hair and odd socks (not that there’s anything wrong with these features, of course!).
• Yes – it is systematic but it’s also fast and flexible! So rather than reinventing an existing solution or product, you can put all your energy and cleverness into developing an idea further and making it work in new applications. Most clever inventions involve applying existing technology in a new field or new combinations. Jeff Bezos, for example, founder of Amazon, didn’t invent the Internet or bookshops. Rather, he put them together to create an innovative new company.
• No – you’re not copying! Because the nature of TRIZ solutions is very general, and you have to apply them in a specific context, you’re not acting like a human Xerox machine, you’re being inspired. The inspiration derives from a useful and proven solution – but it still requires a lot of creativity, clever thinking and domain knowledge to turn it into something practical and useful. This is the most exciting part of using TRIZ – your brain is thinking freely, you’re making new connections between existing knowledge and you’re creating something completely new.

Learning to think conceptually

Thinking conceptually is one of the most important skills you can learn from TRIZ. It means discovering how to strip out the detail of a situation and see it in a more general, abstract way. Thinking conceptually enables you to see many new possibilities and stops you getting stuck in unnecessary detail and developing psychological inertia in relation to a situation or solution (see Chapter 7 for the lowdown on confronting psychological inertia).

To be able to think conceptually, you need to understand the difference between a concept and an idea. A concept is a general way of doing something; an idea is a specific way of putting that concept into practice. For example, ‘cook an egg’ is a concept; ‘frying an egg’ is an idea. Boiling, poaching and scrambling are also ideas – you can cook an egg in many, many different ways!

When you’ve identified the general concept of thinking conceptually, it becomes very easy to see other ways of putting that concept into practice, and to generate many other ideas.

Having learned how to look at the concepts behind each idea proposed by other people, it’s also very easy to build on and improve their ideas or suggest alternative ways of putting their concept into practice. When someone says, ‘Oh but you can’t do that because …’ you can suggest an alternative idea resulting from the same concept. This approach helps you think more flexibly and creatively. Generating ideas is much easier when you have a starting point – and the concepts behind other people’s ideas can provide just that. Even if you can’t think of an idea yourself, you can use intelligent questions to prompt others to come up with different ways in which to put that concept into practice.

Idea–Concept is a simple creativity tool to help people generate lots of ideas. It is very useful when you need to generate a lot of ideas quickly, and works both when you are working alone and with other people. What usually happens when you are given a problem is that you often find it easy to think of one or two ideas immediately; however, you can quickly run dry. Always allow your initial free thinking and natural spark of creativity to happen first, and capture those initial ideas. However, when you are running out of steam, you need to apply an explicit tool such as Idea–Concept. When lots of ideas are needed, teams are often brought together to brainstorm: using Idea–Concept will help supercharge any team brainstorming activity.

When using Idea–Concept with a team:

1. State the problem.
2. Ask everyone to think of ideas individually and write them down.
3. Gather the ideas together and identify the concepts that lie behind them.
4. Take each concept and use it to trigger new ideas.

Consider, for example, asking people to come up with as many uses of an object (such as bubble wrap) as possible. This is a simple way to get people to understand the difference between ideas and concepts. Figure 2-1 shows an example of how this works.

Using Idea–Concept thinking, going from 3 initial ideas to 30 very quickly can be pretty easy. Bear in mind that some clever ideas have more than one concept behind them. That’s okay; it just gives you more concepts to play with!

Creativity is difficult to measure. The Alternative Uses Task, devised by psychologist J.P. Guilford (1897–1987) in 1967, is one way in which to do so (and has been used in one form or another for most creativity tests since). It asks you to list as many different ways to use a brick as possible as a means of measuring your divergent thinking. The number of ideas you come up with is one measure of your creativity, and flexibility, originality and elaboration are also gauged. I had to complete this task at school and in more than one university interview; if I’d known about TRIZ and Idea–Concept thinking back then, I may have come across as a genius!

Reapplying proven knowledge to solve problems

The TRIZ approach says that any problem you encounter has probably also been dealt with by other people. If you can learn to look at both problems and solutions in a more general way, you can see how your problem is similar to other people’s problems, and then work out how to reapply their clever solutions to your situation.

When you start to think in a more abstract way, it becomes easier to see how to reapply proven knowledge. In TRIZ, this approach is described as moving around the Prism of TRIZ. Check out Figure 2-2 for a funky diagram of this concept.

James Dyson used cyclone separation to create his bagless vacuum cleaner, using technology that separates dust from air utilised in the sawmill industry for more than 100 years. De Mestral invented Velcro after noticing how burrs attached to his dog’s fur. Electric car manufacturer Tesla copied Apple’s business model of placing company-owned retail outlets in prestigious locations rather than the traditional approach to selling cars via franchised dealers. This was a clever analogy to draw on, because Tesla (like Apple) sells on brand rather than product.

TRIZ tells you that if you want to be a genius problem solver and to develop innovative ideas, you don’t need to solve every problem from scratch – you can use existing knowledge to generate many clever and inventive solutions. As soon as you learn to strip out the detail, you can then go and look, systematically, for useful concepts that will solve your conceptual problem. Adopting this approach – asking whether anyone has solved this problem before – will help you use your creativity most efficiently and develop your inventive problem-solving ability.

When looking for similar problems in different industries, start with the people for whom this problem is life and death, those working in industries that operate in difficult conditions such as below sea or in space (NASA actively promotes the reuse of its technology – check out http://technology.nasa.gov/ for details of NASA’s Technology Transfer Program, which has a number of great online resources such as a searchable patent portfolio, success stories and an inventions and contributions board). Other good places to look are in industries that spend lots of money researching and developing solutions, such as big pharmaceutical companies, or those that produce goods in very large quantities because they’ll have worked very hard to make their systems reliable and cheap. Patents are also a great place to start: the point of a patent is to describe how a new invention or innovation works, but many have expired or lapsed, meaning they are available for use – check out Google Patents (https://patents.google.com/) and Espacenet (http://worldwide.espacenet.com/).

Getting everything you want without changing anything

The statement ‘getting everything you want without changing anything’ contains two fundamental elements of the TRIZ philosophy.

The first is, go for what you want even if problems exist. TRIZ problem solving is positive: you start by identifying all the things you want, in the belief that you’ll be able to achieve them. Sure, you’ll encounter problems, but you’ll be able to solve them (see later in this section for more on this idea).

The first thing that happens when you start listing all the things you want is other people telling you all the reasons why it’s impossible, impractical, too expensive, too time-consuming and so on … however … the TRIZ philosophy says that you somehow get everything you want without changing anything – so you don’t incur any extra cost, have to make the effort to change your system or face any risk. This TRIZ statement sounds really wacky. And it is. And that’s why it’s so useful – it forces you to stretch your thinking, uncover the things you want and then find inventive and resourceful solutions to the problem. I’ve solved countless problems using this philosophy, both in my own working life and at home, on everything from hiring new staff to devising new workshops. Thinking in this way is useful because it’s the opposite approach to the pragmatic thinking most people employ day to day. If you’re producing a new version of a product, it’s very easy just to look at the existing product and tweak it slightly – starting from what you have. In contrast, this approach suggests that you start by thinking about what you’d offer in an ideal world – what you really want – and then identify how it can be achieved without changing anything. Sometimes this ideal scenario is possible; at other times change is required but often on a much smaller scale than you imagined. (Feeling thirsty? Check out the ‘Share a Coke’ sidebar nearby for a great example of a small but effective change.)

Developing confidence

Confidence helps you take your problem solving in the right direction. TRIZ encourages you to go for what you want even if there are downsides, because you can be confident you’ll get there in the end by solving problems as they occur. This confidence means you’re more likely to produce real innovation because you leap forward to what you want rather than shuffle along to some pragmatic quick fix.

Confidence breeds perseverance, which is an important element of creative problem solving. When you put something new into practice, inevitably, alongside the benefits, you begin to identify other things that aren’t going to plan or encounter unexpected problems. What do you do then – give up? No, you say ‘Great, another problem’, and tackle it with TRIZ. Being confident that you can deal with anything thrown your way means that you don’t give up when things get difficult or go wrong. Instead, you learn from, fix and improve them.

Confidence is crucial to the thought processes that encourage creative thinking. Research demonstrates that people who learn TRIZ are more confident in their ability to generate creative ideas, which often comes as a surprise to engineers, scientists and so on. With TRIZ in your mental toolbox, you too can feel confident in your ability to tackle any problem using creative thinking.

Confidence is a necessary but not sufficient condition for creative problem solving: you have to believe that you can solve a problem before you even begin to tackle it – but you still need the right tools to do so.

Confidence comes from within. But when you’re anxious you can still put your trust in TRIZ. I’ve facilitated numerous problem-solving sessions in which people tackle large, difficult, seemingly insurmountable problems with serious downsides if they remain unresolved (plummeting share prices and redundancies, for example). In those scary moments I’ve seen teams of people clutching their matrices and charting their progress through the problem-solving map. They didn’t need to have confidence in their own cleverness: the TRIZ process would take them in the right directions to good solutions. And this knowledge let them let go, stop panicking and start thinking clearly.

Using TRIZ processes for understanding and solving problems

Stories abound of great scientific or engineering discoveries being made in the shower, on a bus or in a dream. Revelations strike like a bolt from the blue. What a lovely experience. But how completely useless to you when you’re at work, something’s gone wrong and you need to fix it now!

When a piece of equipment starts leaking, engineers can’t announce they need a nice long walk or a little nap to think about the problem and hope for inspiration. What usually happens is that people sit down together and try to understand logically what’s going on and then find a solution. Often this scenario involves a meeting or brainstorming session, but what is even more useful at this point is using a systematic and reliable process to ensure the real problem has been uncovered and the right solution is found.

Using logical processes for understanding and solving problems ensures that you cover all the necessary parts of the issue, identify the potential problems and then generate solutions – reliably. This approach is less dramatic than random inspiration (and potentially involves less fun) but it’s a lot more useful!

TRIZ step-by-step processes for problem solving also help keep everyone engaged together, confident of their direction and able to work through all the necessary information. Some people like to jump straight to brainstorming – other people like to work through a full and detailed understanding of the problem. Both are useful and reveal important information, so it’s important that both are completed: having efficient systematic processes which take you to the right, relevant solution spaces ensures that there is time enough for both.

In stressful situations, it’s tempting to just go with the first good solution that’s suggested. However, that solution may be premature and you may miss some crucial part or cause of the problem. Logically stepping through the problem ensures that the whole problem is covered and the right solutions uncovered.

Thinking freely

Perversely, thinking in a structured way helps your brain think more freely. Many problems are very complicated and involve taking in a huge amount of information. TRIZ helps you chunk down the information into manageable pieces, and shows you where to focus your attention. Really difficult and complex problems can also be a bit intimidating; it can be hard to know where to start, and taking in the whole thing all at once can feel overwhelming.

Working through the TRIZ process means that when you’re trying to think of new solutions, you do so one step at a time. Rather than trying to solve the whole problem all at once, you deal with small sub-problems one by one. This structure helps you think completely freely at each step – and you can bounce around in your thinking as much as you like – so long as you come back to the process eventually.

Challenging assumptions

The thing about assumptions is that you usually don’t know you’re making them. Your assumptions are sometimes implicit and sometimes the result of hard-won experience of what works and what doesn’t. Someone once told me that he didn’t need TRIZ as he’d seen every problem that could possibly occur in his industry and knew the solution to it. This kind of experience and expertise is fantastically useful for efficient and quick problem solving. However, it also means that the same problems are always fixed with the same solutions, and perhaps other (better, cheaper, faster) resolutions exist.

Psychological research into expertise shows that experts are able to chunk information together and, over time, identify patterns in what works and what doesn’t. Ultimately, they’re able to remember the patterns rather than the individual pieces of information. For example, this allows expert chess players to make clever moves because they recognise certain patterns and what to do next. Such pattern recognition can become automatic in any area of expertise. I’ve been singing in choirs all my life and can sight-read well because I don’t need to work out the notes one at a time – a line of music comprises three or four patterns put together that I can recognise at a glance.

Professional intuition evolves just like that. Experts are able to identify problems and solutions quickly and with great ease because their experience highlights the patterns and key features of the situation, and they almost instantly can see a solution. Getting to this point requires a vast amount of practical experience, but allows for incredibly fast thinking once it’s been acquired. This ability is crucial in highly stressful jobs that often involve time-critical problem solving, such as nursing in intensive care, flying a plane, working in air traffic control or managing a crew of firefighters. Fortunately, most people have a little more time to reach a solution. And thinking time can be quicker in the long run than implementing the wrong solution. Intuitive thinking suggests the right solutions nearly every time but only in routine situations.

What if the situation isn’t routine? And what if you need an innovative solution? This is the point at which you need to challenge your thinking and look for new solutions, but the more experience you have, the harder this will be. So, allow your expertise to suggest the nature of the problem and potential solutions, but then apply an explicit method to challenge your thinking, investigate the problem further and look beyond your intuition to find new solutions.

Another kind of assumption concerns what’s possible. The world is always changing – and perhaps the conditions you assume exist or the limitations of a certain technology just aren’t relevant anymore. Sometimes very promising solutions are rejected too soon because people think they’re impossible. However, just because you don’t know how to do something, doesn’t mean that no one else does. It’s always worth finding out if the knowledge you seek is available in your own company.

Often teams don’t hold the same assumptions either, about the type of solution they’re looking for, the nature of the problem or the best way to go about tackling it. Consider my favourite joke: an engineer, a physicist and a statistician are at work one day when suddenly a wastepaper basket catches fire. The engineer starts looking for an extinguisher in order to put out the fire, the physicist begins calculating exactly how much thermal energy is being produced in order to plan the next step and the statistician sets fire to all the other wastepaper baskets in the room. ‘What are you doing?’ say the engineer and physicist in alarm, to which the statistician replies, ‘We need a bigger sample.’