Why bad solutions are a good idea

One really important aspect of creative thinking is allowing yourself to think of all solutions without judgement. Most creativity approaches say much the same thing, including the rules of brainstorming (covered in Chapter 3).

One technique for making yourself view all ideas non-judgementally is to name them bad solutions, which simply acknowledges that they’re imperfect and can be improved upon. Your, or someone else’s, idea is a bad solution to the problem at hand; it’s a top-of-the-head idea that can be improved and developed by you and others.

Bad solutions help you generate more ideas individually and as a team. Always capture all solutions as they occur to you, and put them in a ‘Bad Solution Park’. Never squash any solutions, no matter how wacky they are (you can discard them later, if necessary).

Bad solutions are very important for creativity because they can break your psychological inertia. Bad solutions tell you something you want, and the reason they may be imperfect is simply that you don’t know how to put them into practice (but someone else might). Bad solutions challenge what you think is possible, and you must always bear in mind that someone else may be able to find or already know a practical way to implement your terrible solution.

During a problem-solving session with a small team of software engineers who wrote the software for aircraft testing rigs, one of the problems they identified was the quality of the data they produced. Some wacky person suggested that the team buy a plane, which was so far beyond the realms of possibility that everyone laughed. But then someone realised they could actually rent a plane: a practical and cheap way to get what they wanted. This idea was ultimately one of five solutions taken forward from the day’s problem solving.

If you have an idea, write it down. If you think it’s completely impractical, you may just be experiencing psychological inertia!

Using the 13 TRIZ tools for creative thinking

Applying explicit TRIZ tools to shape your thinking on an issue will force you to look at it from a new angle, and also uncover the existence of psychological inertia and help overcome it. The trick is to allow this to happen – accept that your current view may be blinkered by assumptions and take a few minutes to explore it with a different way of thinking. Basically, you need to suspend disbelief or judgement for a time. All TRIZ tools challenge psychological inertia and stimulate your creativity in different ways so that you can apply it to your thinking throughout the problem-solving process.

That said, 13 of the TRIZ thinking tools and approaches can be applied as specific creative thinking tools:

• Thinking in Time and Scale (Chapter 8) helps you to explore at what level a problem needs to be tackled. Completing a 9 Box Solution Map (Chapters 8 and 9) helps you find inventive solutions to your problems.
• The Ideal Outcome (Chapter 9) helps you push the boundaries of what’s possible and stretches your thinking to generate more ideal solutions.
• The Bad Solution Park (Chapter 11) helps you capture all solutions by challenging the nature of the solution required and stimulating new ideas by sharing solutions.
• Inventive Principle 13 (The Other Way Round; Chapter 3) shakes up your view of the problem to help you find creative solutions.
• The Prism of TRIZ (Chapter 6) helps you find analogous solutions: you strip out unnecessary detail, understand your essential problem and then find out if anyone has solved it before.
• The X-Factor (Chapter 6) helps you locate what you want using only what you have.
• Hybridising (Chapter 10) makes you combine solutions to get the best of each.
• Differentiating between benefits, functions and features (Chapter 5) helps you identify alternative ways to get what you want.
• Simple language (Chapter 6) helps you gain clarity of thought, which prevents psychological inertia regarding the scope of solutions.
• Idea–Concept thinking (Chapter 2) helps you generate many ideas from one solution.
• Life and death analogies (Chapter 6) make you consider others for whom your problem is critical and from there to identify relevant industries that may have tackled it in the past.
• Smart Little People (this chapter) shows you how to model problems and find new solutions.
• Size–Time–Cost (this chapter) helps you exaggerate your thinking to find new solutions.

All the TRIZ tools shown in this list can be used as simple creativity tools to help you restructure your view of the problem, stimulate your thinking to define your problem differently and find new answers.

Modelling problems and solutions conceptually

Smart Little People provides you with a method to model your problem – and generate solutions – conceptually.

Smart Little People is a short-circuit around the Prism of TRIZ (see Chapter 6). You take a real-world, detailed problem and describe it as if the whole problem zone was made up of Smart Little People:

• Smart: Because they’re clever. They can do – or be – anything. You can have helpful little people who solve problems and naughty little people who create them.
• Little: They can be as small as they need to be, right down to the cellular level (I’ve seen molecular bonds modelled as little people holding hands).
• People: They’re not really people; they’re pretend. But they have agency and can do stuff and work together as a team. Most people draw them as stick men, but don’t let that hold you back – no reason exists for them to have two legs and two arms and one head.

Smart Little People is a very good tool for modelling any kind of real-world problem. I’ve encountered it used to model oil leaks in an engine (showing where and how the naughty little people escape and what can be done to prevent it); growing crystals for use in semi-conductors (showing how the molecular bonding is happening and where imperfections may be occurring); and medical devices (showing how a needle parts skin and exactly how the drug enters the patient’s system) – to name but three.

When you use Smart Little People, you zoom in and enter the problem zone. As you model your problem, you identify exactly what’s going on in that location. You become aware of the fine details so that you can focus on the place where your problem is occurring – but in a conceptual way. Your Smart Little People then help you find solutions.

Breaking out of practical thinking

Smart Little People helps bring very fresh thinking to a problem because you literally step out of the real world into an imaginary universe where you model a situation using teeny tiny people. It can generate quite wacky, silly thinking and, as a result, can be a lot of fun. For this reason, sometimes very serious people can at first be a little alarmed by the whole idea, but this aspect of the tool is actually quite important.

Studies demonstrate that creative thinking is often enhanced by a positive mood: if you’re joking and laughing as you work on a problem, you’re more likely to generate creative and inventive ideas than if you’re all being terribly serious. A positive mood encourages flexible thinking, making novel and unusual connections between things and more fluid idea generation. However, in addition to the fun, Smart Little People is a structured and systematic way of helping you approach your problem from a new direction, and then to generate solutions. Because you’re working in a pretend situation with imaginary people, it’s easier to think of solutions to problems because your thinking doesn’t have to be realistic and, as a result, is freer and more creative.

Let’s step through an example, this time by redesigning a garlic press.

Traditional garlic presses are easy to use but fiddly and difficult to clean. You want to produce a garlic press that is easier to clean.

First, draw a picture of the system you want to improve or the problem area. Doing so helps you clarify what you want to look at and what you need to cover. Second, take your system and model how it functions using Smart Little People: model both what it does and all the problems that are occurring. Figure 7-1 shows one way in which your garlic press could be imagined as Smart Little People.

Third, when you’ve modelled all the problems as Smart Little People, think of ways in which useful little people could come along and help. What could they do to solve the problems? Model conceptual solutions as little people doing useful things: some examples are shown in Figure 7-2.

During this step, don’t worry too much about how your potential solutions become a reality. Instead, focus on how the little people could help. Figure 7-2 provides some examples:

• The garlic press people could push the garlic flesh and juice people away.
• Some other helpful little people could arrive with brushes and sweep away the garlic flesh and juice people.
• The garlic press people could chop up the garlic flesh people with swords.

The fourth step is to work out how these ideas could be turned into real-world solutions.

Bringing wacky ideas back to reality

When you’ve modelled your conceptual solutions with Smart Little People, you then have to work out how these could translate into real-world solutions. Your experience and expertise become useful at this point and you focus your search for practical solutions on a number of different specific functions that you’ve identified through the actions of your Smart Little People.

For the garlic press example shown previously in Figure 7-2, you take each of your conceptual solutions and work out how it could become a reality:

• You could imagine that the solution that involves pushing the garlic people could turn into some kind of coating on the press, such as Teflon, which makes the press very slippery, hard for the garlic to attach to and easy to clean.
• The new helpful people with brushes could suggest having another part of the press that slots into the holes and cleans them. It could be made of something that will clean effectively but not get dirty itself, such as prongs made from silicone.
• The swords idea suggests a method of chopping the garlic with something that’s flat, sharp and easy to clean. Rather than crushing the garlic, you could create something that presses it against a set of sharp blades and slices it. Again, the surface needs to be easy to rinse clean, and, combining this idea with the one in the first bullet, perhaps made of or coated with something very slippery.

When you use Smart Little People, you move through the Prism of TRIZ in the manner shown in Figure 7-3. You start with a real-world problem, and translate it into a conceptual problem, described as little people. Then you imagine a conceptual answer, and have to translate it into something real. The last stage in moving around the Prism of TRIZ connects your conceptual, imaginative answer with your real-world experience and expertise to help you create eventual, real-world solutions.

Restructuring your view of what’s possible

When problem solving or looking for new ideas, you generally have a good feel for the constraints of any solutions you come up with. When you buy a new car, you know roughly what sort of budget you can afford, even before you calculate the numbers properly. If a sliding scale exists ranging from very expensive cars such as Lamborghinis and Bentleys to more affordable options like Suzukis and Skodas, you probably know roughly where your budget fits on it. This is true of most situations in life when you’re problem solving, even if you aren’t consciously aware of it. That knowledge, of what you believe you can afford or is possible, can result in psychological inertia, whereby you place false constraints on the situation without realising you’re doing so.

One of the trickiest aspects of psychological inertia is that often you don’t know you’re experiencing it.

Stretching your thinking and pushing constraints on elements such as size and budget is often worthwhile to see if spending just a little bit more can result in a cheaper option over time. For example, choosing a slightly more expensive but also more reliable car that requires less maintenance is probably cost-effective in the long run. You can apply that logic in both directions, so also consider spending less. Doing so may deliver as much as you want or need but you simply hadn’t considered that option. When you work through this TRIZ process, you don’t push your thinking a little, you think in extremes. You imagine what kind of car you’d have with both a zero and an infinite budget and a really enormous and tiny car, as shown in Figure 7-4.

Stretching your thinking in this way allows you to consider all types of solution beyond your initial assumptions and helps you come up with other ways in which to get the things you want. You may want a car that’s suitable for a number of different purposes, such as taking long business trips, transporting large amounts of groceries and getting about town. Stretching your thinking so that you imagine an unlimited budget may suggest employing a chauffeur or buying a fleet of different cars, each perfect for its individual task. A zero budget may suggest not buying a car at all and using public transport. Bringing these ideas back to reality may suggest choosing a car most suitable for one task and finding alternatives for the others; for example, buying a small car for getting about town, hiring a big car for long journeys and getting all your groceries delivered.

The benefit of thinking in extremes is that you don’t have to worry about practicality (at first). Often, when you’re trying to think of solutions to real problems, you start to judge ideas almost immediately, testing them and picking them apart as they’re generated. Doing so slows you down and can be discouraging. The luxury of playing with extreme, impractical ideas allows your brain to work most effectively because you’re not constantly second-guessing yourself and instead your thinking can flow freely. After you’ve generated impractical ideas, you can then work out how to turn them into reality.

You stretch your thinking in this way using the Size–Time–Cost tool, as shown in Figure 7-5. These are the parameters that most commonly constrain your thinking, but you don’t have to limit yourself to these. You may want to consider other parameters, such as number of staff if you’re trying to solve a staffing issue. You can consider tackling the problem with an infinite number of people and no people at all.

Finding inventive solutions

Consider trying to reduce energy use in an office building. Here’s an example of using TRIZ creative thinking tools to generate innovative solutions.

Rising fuel prices and increasing environmental awareness mean that many organisations are now trying to reduce the amount of energy they use. Here we apply Size–Time–Cost to stretch our thinking and generate novel solutions to reduce the amount of energy being used to heat, cool and power offices. Table 7-1 demonstrates this process.