Challenging constraints: Real or imagined?

One of the major benefits of stretching your thinking beyond practical limits is that it helps you challenge constraints, and by challenging them you discover whether they’re real or not. You may find that they are real, but it’s still worth asking the question. Trying to find solutions within imaginary constraints makes your job needlessly difficult, and constrains not only the kind of solutions you come up with but also your thinking, inhibiting the flow of ideas.

The nine dots problem demonstrates how false constraints inhibit clever thinking, and solving it is often given as an example of insight problem solving and creative thinking. Participants are shown nine dots, as in Figure 10-2, and asked to draw five continuous, straight lines, which pass through each of the nine dots, without their pencil leaving the paper. This is easy: they usually come up with a solution, as shown in Figure 10-3. Then – and this is the hard bit – they are asked to complete the same task, but using only four continuous, straight lines. While this appears to be an easy problem in the sense that lots of potential solutions exist, in fact it’s psychologically very difficult; generally, fewer than 5 per cent of people see the solution. Why is it hard? Because people construct a false constraint: they see a ‘box’, created by the outer dots and reinforced by the solution they found when drawing five lines, and are reluctant to draw outside it. No box exists for this second problem – only nine dots – and even if it did, no one’s telling them they can’t draw outside it! In fact, even when people have been told explicitly to ‘draw outside the box’, they often struggle to find the solution (shown in Figure 10-4). Not until they see a drawn hint can they find the answer.

This problem has been researched extensively by psychologists over the years and the findings have been repeated over and over again. What it reveals is that thinking ‘outside the box’ is very difficult without prompting. You, like most people, need explicit guidance to reconstruct the conditions of your problems and check constraints. You can’t trust that you’re seeing things correctly, as you may be subject to a range of unconscious biases and assumptions – sometimes based on previous problem-solving success – that form a kind of psychological inertia.

Psychological inertia is a mental rut. When you experience psychological inertia, your thinking is blinkered by unconscious assumptions that hamper your ability to see things as they really are. You can challenge your thinking and ensure you’re not stuck in a rut by restructuring your view of the problem. Doing so helps you challenge your assumptions about the nature of your problem and the kind of solutions that are acceptable. (Check out Chapter 7 for more on tackling psychological inertia.)

Restructuring problems and solutions

All of the TRIZ tools help you restructure how you see your problem and possible solutions. Very often you’ll find that what you considered a constraint isn’t real, and for this reason problem solving with other departments is essential. When you ask all relevant people involved in the development and delivery of solutions to work with you (from marketing to the supply chain), you often find that what they’re willing to accept is much broader than you’d assumed.

One common error when problem solving is working on someone’s ‘bad solution’ to an underlying and more fundamental problem. When you complete the Ideal Outcome (see Chapter 9 for more details), you decide at what level to scope your problem and what type of solutions to look at. You establish whether you want to keep improving that initial bad solution or go up a level and look at the more fundamental problem this solution is tackling.

I facilitated a TRIZ problem-solving session focused on improving a complicated bit of kit for an underwater energy-generation device. Only when the team completed their Ideal Outcome did they realise that the company was using this device because it wanted faster installation – and the device was only one way to achieve this outcome. They then took the scope of the problem solving up a level and looked at ways of getting what they really wanted: faster installation. The team generated lots of clever, easier solutions to the problem as a result of changing the scope of the problem.

Another powerful tool for restructuring your view of a problem is Thinking in Time and Scale (explained in Chapter 8). This helps you understand the context and detail of your problem and how they relate, which may result in seeing opportunities that have eluded you in the past. Numerous problem-solving sessions have been cracked open by looking at the impact of time and scale as people realise that many other opportunities exist beyond their current focus.

Thinking crazily (while being practical)

A large part of the TRIZ magic comes from the ability to think wildly and then turn those wild thoughts into reality. Pragmatic and sensible behaviour is what’s usually rewarded and appreciated at work. If a colleague complains that the printer’s jammed, she probably wants your help to pull out the mangled paper, rather than a suggestion that she go paperless, invent a new printer or communicate entirely through the medium of interpretive dance. However, when you need creative thinking, you have to step away from that pragmatic, sensible approach and be open to all ideas.

Don’t get me wrong – TRIZ is still very serious and will end up delivering practical solutions because TRIZ thinking is both very imaginative and entirely grounded in reality. TRIZ takes you on a little holiday from your normal pragmatic approach – in the sense that it’s a place where you can have fun and play – but you don’t stay there; ultimately, you come back home. This process allows you to think impractically as your brain runs free, but then to work out how to turn those impractical ideas into a practical solution.

Very serious technical people sometimes resist this approach because they worry that generating impractical solutions will be a waste of time, and nothing useful will come out of it. However, there’s something important and serious about thinking more freely, outside the boundaries of reality. It’s one way in which to challenge your psychological inertia and think of more ideal solutions. The TRIZ creativity tools help you to think in a different way, primarily Smart Little People and Size–Time–Cost (both Chapter 7) and defining your Ideal Outcome (Chapter 9).

The TRIZ solution tools, based on patent analysis – the 40 Inventive Principles (Chapter 3), Trends of Technical Evolution (Chapter 4), Standard Solutions (Chapter 13) and Effects Database (Chapter 6) – also stimulate your creativity but in a very focused way, around conceptual solutions that have been used successfully in the past.

If some of the suggested solutions seem improbable, don’t give up. Inventive Principle 13, for example, suggests doing something the other way round or upside down, which may seem very wacky but has many simple and practical applications that are obvious in retrospect. Putting the opening for ketchup bottles on the bottom, not the top, means gravity aids the passage of the thick and viscous liquid. This solution has been repeated in other places; most hair conditioner bottles now also have their opening on the bottom, which also makes them easy to distinguish from the right way up but otherwise matching shampoo bottle even with closed eyes in a shower.

Because TRIZ provides a structured process for problem solving (tackled in Chapter 11), people who may otherwise be resistant to this very free thinking can relax: their thinking is both highly structured and utterly free. TRIZ solves this contradiction by providing individual periods of very free thinking within a series of structured steps.

Improving imperfect solutions

TRIZ is fantastically pragmatic when it comes to solutions, to the extent of being really quite strict. You’re always striving for the ideal, and any solution you come up with is likely to be imperfect. As a TRIZ problem solver you want to find all the imperfections in your solutions so that you can improve them. This is one reason why capturing everything you want is so important: any place that your existing system or solution doesn’t meet your Ideal is an opportunity for improvement.

When you have a well-defined system or solution already in practice and you know how it works, you can map all its problems using Function Analysis (explained in Chapter 12). This pulls out any harms or insufficient actions that you can improve using the Standard Solutions and any contradictions you can solve using the 40 Principles (flick back to Chapter 3 to find out more about these).

A quick route for improving solutions – particularly if they’re new and thus not well defined – is to identify any contradictions. Take your solution and identify what’s good and bad about it in a simple table such as the one shown in Table 10-1. When you’ve identified what’s good and bad in normal language, you can translate that into Technical or Physical Contradictions, and look up which of the 40 Inventive Principles will be able to improve your system.

The example shown in Table 10-1 is taken from a recent problem-solving session with one of Highways England’s maintenance suppliers: together these organisations manage a high volume, complex programme of highway engineering schemes on an annual basis. The majority of the works are planned, but unplanned maintenance repairs are also needed as issues arise on the highway network.

Currently, not one single overarching programme exists to encompass all the construction schemes (both major and minor) plus smaller maintenance activities that are taking place on the highway network in a maintenance area.

The current programme that exists for undertaking maintenance activities can be quite volatile and results in reactive working, and this programme does not take account of major project activities on the network. Coupled with the fact that the annual investment in the roads network will double in the next two years, this leads to more pressure on the delivery of an overall stable programme of works.

The team concluded that an ideal works programme (seeking Ideality) would be one that encompassed everything and was totally rigid and was always adhered to. However, it was understood that this was not practically achievable due to unplanned reactionary activities. This therefore led to the view that we needed a programme that was both rigid and flexible, which is the contradiction: how can you have a programme that is both rigid and flexible?

Looking up this contradiction in the Technical Contradiction Matrix (see Chapter 3) suggested Principle 35, Parameter Change. This principle suggests establishing varying degrees of flexibility for the different projects – casting large, complex projects in stone and increasing flexibility the smaller projects become. This was a revolutionary moment for the team, as the suggestion was both highly innovative for the company and relatively easy to implement.

Another approach for improving solutions is to conduct an Ideality Audit of your solutions. Ideality is a measure of how good something is, as explained by this funky equation:

Good, eh?

This identifies all the benefits your solution is delivering, and where those benefits may be insufficient (an opportunity to apply the Standard Solutions in Chapter 13). If you have missing benefits, you can apply X-Factor thinking and the Effects Database to deliver them (both Chapter 6). You identify all costs and also how you could potentially reduce or remove them by trimming out components while keeping their useful action (see Chapter 14). Any harms you identify, you can deal with by applying the Standard Solutions for harms (described in Chapter 13). You can also take any solution or system and improve it by driving it up the Trends (see Chapter 4). Job done!

Fixing things when something’s gone wrong

Don’t give up! You’ve just hit a problem. And you love problems – you’re a TRIZ problem solver.

TRIZ problem solving is an iterative process, which means you don’t just do it once: you get the best results when you repeat the process on any solutions you generate, as each time you do so you get closer to your goal. As a result, TRIZ is often a suggested approach during project development, for example, as part of an already established process. Much of TRIZ’s focus is on the generation of new solutions and new methods of working at the first stage of a project. This is a good approach, because it’s best to come up with a strong solution early on rather than fix up weak solutions.

However, the reality of life is that even the best solutions run into problems: for this reason, TRIZ is useful during any stage of a project. Being surprised when this happens is pointless; rather, you need to plan for it. I worked with a team of engineers who planned to use TRIZ together with a stage-gate process: their product development process was separated into a number of stages, each of which had a ‘gate’ where decisions were made about whether (and how) to go forward. At any point in the process when the product hit a snag or something went wrong – a problem with the concept, the design, the prototype, manufacturing, the supply chain – the team would apply TRIZ.

TRIZ is also a useful addition to any process that involves reviews, such as design reviews: any problems or shortcomings that have been identified can benefit from the application of TRIZ.

The point is that things do go wrong, but now you know what to do next! Use TRIZ!

Knowing when to stop

Sometimes, despite your best efforts, the solution you’ve been working on just keeps going wrong, and for every step forward you seem to take at least another one back.

While most problems can be addressed by applying TRIZ, in some cases TRIZ won’t be able to help:

• When emotional, political or any other non-logical reasons are preventing you moving forward: TRIZ is logical and assumes you are too. If your solution is being hampered by a political fight between your boss and that of another department, you’ll need to deal with that issue separately.
• If you can no longer change things: If the outcome has already been decided or resources have disappeared (for example, budget, time, people), unless you can reframe the issue to include managing these issues, you’ll just have to accept that you can’t do any more.
• When you’re the only one who cares about solving the problem but the solution relies on other people: You need to engage them before you apply TRIZ or you’ll keep running into a brick wall.
• If you lack the knowledge to make something work: Fortunately, you can usually find and engage that knowledge, and I recommend calling on the help of experts when needed (academics are often helpful).

Sometimes you’re held back by circumstances beyond your control. Luckily for you, there are usually ways around problems, and if you keep a record of your problem-solving process, you can go back a step or two and find alternative routes forward.

You can take whatever’s getting in your way and frame it as a TRIZ problem to be solved (whether it’s your boss’s personality or lack of resources or any of the other problems suggested in the bullet list above). What’s important is that you tackle them separately to the issue at hand.

Recognising why bad solutions are a good idea

The phrase ‘bad solutions’ doesn’t appear anywhere in the original Russian TRIZ literature (as far as I’m aware), but it’s a crucial part of the TRIZ approach. Bad solutions tell you both something about what you want and what’s getting in the way of your achieving it. This knowledge gives you a very direct route to generating more and better solutions.

The most famous TRIZ tool is probably solving contradictions. A contradiction arises when you want something but it has a downside – in an actual, practical solution. In that particular solution you can’t get one without the other, but this ‘bad solution’ gives you incredibly useful information both about what you want and what is stopping you getting it.

Going back to our cheese grater example in Chapter 3 (if you’ve not yet read that chapter, we wanted a cheese grater that grates a lot of cheese but doesn’t make a mess), no contradiction is evident in these desires. The contradiction exists in a specific solution: that as we make our cheese grater wider and thus have a larger surface area, so we get faster grating, but the cheese then goes everywhere. Lots of other solutions may give us what we want without this contradiction, and we can find and access them by starting with just one bad solution. We take our initial bad solution and understand what’s good and bad about it, uncover and then solve the contradictions, and generate new, better solutions. Often these solutions look very different from our initial solution. This is another example of TRIZ being both very conceptual and also rooted in the nitty-gritty of real-world problems. You can start with a specific solution, understand what’s good and bad about it, uncover all the things you want, find out what’s missing or imperfect in that solution and come up with something much, much better. And this is why bad solutions are so important: each one tells you something interesting and important about what you’re looking for.

Don’t be afraid of your initial, top-of-the-head ideas, as they can provide useful information. Consider starting a TRIZ problem-solving session by brainstorming because it can help you begin to think of all the things you want in advance of completing the Ideal Outcome (described in Chapter 9). Capturing all solutions allows people to focus on the process rather than their preconceived outcome. People attend TRIZ sessions armed with their own solutions and are unable to concentrate fully until they’ve shared them. They won’t be able to help themselves because they love those solutions.

Seeing the flaws in your own solutions

All TRIZ processes are about taking bad solutions and making them better. You’ve got to learn to let this happen to your own solutions too: accept that you love them but that as they go through the TRIZ process they may change beyond recognition. Don’t hold them back – they’re achieving their destiny.

You can’t help but love your own ideas. Like ugly babies, you think they’re beautiful and perfect and can’t see anything wrong with them. Your colleagues, however, can see every flaw that you’re blind to. This situation is okay. You need to love your ideas if you’re going to have the motivation and stamina to develop them into good solutions and put them into practice. But it’s also important to understand that a problem may be solved in many, many ways, and your solution is just one way. Your colleagues will also have their own solutions, and you’ll be able to spot their problems. You need to regard each other’s views as a useful resource and an inevitable side effect of the creative process. It’s much easier to love your own solutions than someone else’s, but you have to learn to share your own solutions with humility and listen to other people’s with good grace if you’re going to work well in a team.

Learning to love other people’s solutions

By calling your ideas ‘bad solutions,’ you lower the threshold for sharing. Your idea doesn’t have to be good – it can actually be terrible. But because you’re prefacing it with ‘bad’, you’re acknowledging it has faults and don’t have to feel embarrassed about it. When you try to generate solutions, you’ll always come up with a whole range of ideas, from the well-defined and brilliant to the interesting-but-flawed and wacky, impractical and really off the wall. The wilder solutions will probably have bigger problems, but your brain will have generated them for a reason. You need to capture all those solutions because ways may exist to deal with the problems. If you don’t feel judged, you’ll share more ideas.

One of the most important aspects of innovative teams is trust: people feel comfortable sharing their solutions with colleagues because they know they won’t be laughed at or ridiculed. Any idea, no matter how wacky, impractical, improbable and bizarre, tells you something interesting about what you’re looking for and may have a seed of genius buried within it. By creating a culture in which all initial solutions are termed ‘bad solutions’ (that is, they’re imperfect and can be improved upon), everyone will find it easy to share ideas with others and build upon them.

Capturing, sharing and combining solutions

When you share everything you’re thinking, your brain is running free and as soon as you’ve had – and let go of – the first couple of solutions, you’ll generate more, usually better, ideas. You need to generate flow for effective creative thinking, and not stopping to judge or critique ideas keeps it going. Bad solutions can also stimulate someone else’s creativity: she may see a problem with your solution and know how to fix it, or see another way of putting the concept behind your idea into practice.

Capturing all solutions in a Bad Solution Park means you can share them very effectively. One method is to go around the room asking everyone for their solutions, one at a time. This approach ensures that everyone contributes at least one solution, which is shared and captured. Some people find it easy to generate many solutions to a problem very quickly, and they’ll have a huge pile of sticky notes in front of them; others may generate only one or two, and require more time.

Using a Bad Solution Park and asking everyone for one solution at a time also ensures that everyone’s voice is heard equally to begin with, and not just the person with the loudest voice or most solutions. Some people are more reserved and can feel intimidated by the thought of talking about their solutions in front of a large group of people. Taking this approach acknowledges that everyone can and did contribute solutions.

Put a Bad Solution Park on the wall during a problem-solving session and review it from time to time. People can slip their ideas on it as they come to them, which benefits those who are shy. Problem solving isn’t a competition: you want to find the best solution to the problem at hand. A Bad Solution Park ensures that everyone can contribute in the way most comfortable for him, and that everyone’s solutions have been shared and can be developed and built upon.

Running a session explicitly for combining and hybridising solutions is a good idea. Often the best solutions emerge from the combination of a number of solutions rather than the idea of one person. Combining ideas creates a hybrid solution of the best bits of individual ideas. Dog breeders create hybrid breeds in this way (for example, the Labradoodle – a cross between a Labrador Retriever and a Poodle), and you too can identify the plus points of each solution and combine them to create your very own Labradoodle solution.

Hybridisation is also known as creating a ‘cabbage-carrot’. Cabbages have delicious leaves but the roots aren’t useful to us – they take up space, use water and remove minerals from the soil. In contrast, carrots have delicious roots but useless leaves. A hybrid would have delicious and useful roots and leaves (alternatively, we could plant beetroot instead).

Creating a climate for innovation

Innovation is the successful and practical application of creativity, taking novel ideas and putting them into practice. For organisations to be innovative, they must encourage staff to find opportunities for innovation, generate creative ideas and implement them.

The most successfully innovative organisations create a conducive climate by:

• Providing resources: Offer practical support in the form of money and time (scheduling projects to include time to try new things).
• Supporting and encouraging creative work and innovative thinking: Praise effort rather than outcome – including innovation and problem solving in performance appraisals.
• Allowing people to take risks: Don’t punish them if something goes wrong.
• Giving people autonomy: Allow people to tackle their work as they see fit without micro-managing them.
• Encouraging sharing of information: Support collaborative, cross-functional working across the organisation.
• Promoting diversity: Create teams of people from different backgrounds, with different experiences and approaches to thinking to generate more creative thinking.
• Communicating a clear vision: Ensure clear goals and strategies for achieving them are developed and communicated at both the organisational and individual level.
• Allowing focus: Give people space and time to concentrate on the most important tasks.
• Matching people with the right skills and experiences with the right tasks: Motivate and stretch them by allowing them to build on their existing skill set.
• Providing training: Offer courses in creative thinking skills – like TRIZ!

If creating an innovative organisation is beyond the scope of your control, you can still encourage innovative problem solving and creative thinking in yourself and the people around you by:

• Being positive: Believe it’s possible to change things and see what’s good in other people’s suggestions.
• Suspending judgement: Don’t judge ideas or new thinking too soon; give yourself some space to play and explore new approaches.
• Being curious: Look for problems and places to improve things.
• Developing your skills: Enhance your ability to put new solutions into practice and find new ways of doing things by broadening your professional experience and practising your creative thinking skills whenever possible.
• Trusting: Create a supportive and positive environment that encourages people to listen to each other and share ideas.
• Building on each other’s ideas: Don’t reinvent the wheel!
• Staying motivated: If you work in an area you find interesting and satisfying, you’ll be more creative.
• Challenging constraints: Always question what’s possible.
• Building a community: There’ll be other people around you who are interested in being more innovative. Get together and help each other on projects – you’ll get a chance to practise your creative thinking skills and learn about other parts of the organisation.
• Scheduling time for creative thinking: Allow time for generating new ideas, trying them out and dealing with any problems that may arise.
• Having fun and remaining serious: Enjoying yourself helps you think more creatively; understanding that things are serious helps you find more problems with the way things are – both of these make it easier to stay motivated, keep working and remain engaged with the process.