In This Chapter

Defining and categorising problems

Looking up relevant solutions

Applying Standard Solutions to real problems

The Standard Solutions are one of the problem-solving tools developed from the categorisation of solutions to existing problems and how those problems have been solved inventively: think of them as a kind of ‘library’ of answers that the world has generated in the past! The Standard Solutions form one of the broadest solution tools in TRIZ, encompassing many of the other tools based on patent analysis (the 40 Inventive Principles, the Trends of Technical Evolution and the Effects Database).

The Standard Solutions are simple TRIZ lists for dealing with problems: one of the tools developed from patent analysis (as described in Chapter 1) which equip you with known, standard ways of dealing with harms, improving insufficiencies and measuring or detecting things.

Defining a Subject–action–Object

In order to apply the Standard Solutions you have to define your problem as a single Subject–action–Object. When you have your Subject–action–Object (SaO) in order, you can then break it down into three components:

• Subject: A component which is delivering an action (for example, an oven)
• Action: A change being made or a ‘doing word’ (for example, heats)
• Object: A component which is changed by the action (for example, food)

You must get your Subject and Object the right way round, as described in the Trimming Rules (Chapter 14), because this makes a big difference to how you look for solutions. Most importantly, it also helps you understand clearly how your system works, what is providing functions and what is being changed.

The Standard Solutions suggest changing the Subject, the action and/or the Object. For this reason, your problem needs to be structured at least as a single SaO, if not as many linked SaOs (a Function Analysis, as described in Chapter 12). Without an SaO, the Standard Solutions suggest only approximate solution directions as you have nothing to which you can precisely and most effectively apply them.

An SaO can describe only four kinds of action:

• Useful actions which deliver something you want
• Insufficient useful actions which deliver something you want but not enough of it
• Excessive useful actions which deliver too much of something you want
• Harmful actions which deliver something you don’t want

Only useful actions are without problems: the other three all point you towards improving the actions to get just what you want (no more, no less). You shouldn’t be afraid to identify problems, in fact I would encourage you to seek out as many problems as possible, as each provides an opportunity for improvement. If you’re not sure whether something is useful or insufficient, for example, err on the side of caution by assuming it’s a problem and mark it as insufficient. This will provide you with a prompt to find ways to improve.

Some examples of modelling some real-life situations as Subject–action–Objects are shown in Figure 13-1.

When you’ve defined your SaO, you’ve described your problem in a simple model. You can then apply the Standard Solutions to deal with the problem and improve your system!

Categorising Problems

In total, there are 76 Standard Solutions. They offer a different angle to other tools, as they categorise problems into broad classes and provide a number of literally ‘standard solutions’ that have been used repeatedly to solve these kinds of problem.

The traditional Russian approach has five classes of solutions organised partly by problem type and partly by solution type (see sidebar), but in Oxford TRIZ these have been rearranged into three classes of solution according to the kind of problem they solve; this makes them easier to use.

The 76 Solutions in Oxford TRIZ are arranged to solve three kinds of problem:

• Dealing with Harm – 24 solutions
• Overcoming Insufficiency – 35 solutions
• Difficulties with Measuring and Detecting – 17 solutions

The Standard Solutions are very ‘listy’: you have a lot more suggestions for new solutions than when you’re looking at, for example, contradictions. When you’re solving contradictions, three or four Inventive Principles may be suggested; when you’re looking at harms, 24 suggestions are available. Some solutions will be a less obvious fit in your specific situation than others, so when using the Standard Solutions, don’t get bogged down if you’re struggling with particular suggestions; keep moving and you’ll find that the solutions start overlapping and inter-connecting.

Dealing with Harmful Actions

Harms are one of the commonest types of problem. A harm is any output that you don’t want. The full list of solutions for dealing with harms is available in Appendix E.

Harms can be things that are actively harmful in your system or simply outputs that aren’t useful to you, such as heat from a light bulb or more programme options on a washing machine than you need.

The point is that output requires an input – and if you don’t want the output, and you’re paying for it in some way, eliminating that output will probably reduce your inputs and costs. For this reason, you treat excessive useful actions in the same way as harmful actions: although the outcome of providing more than you want may be good or neutral, you still need to know if you’re getting too much of it. You can apply the Standard Solutions for dealing with harms to reduce the excessive useful action to a level at which it’s just useful. You also capture risks as harms, even if they don’t always happen: if they’re a possibility you should capture them as problems that you can then deal with.

Components in your system are useful but also bring problems – an example is supermarket carrier bags. The bags provide useful actions – allowing you to pack and then carry your shopping home – but also a number of harmful actions. These include damaging the environment when they decompose, forming debris in the oceans and harming animals if they accidentally ingest them. And costing you 5p, of course! When you start trying to deal with the problems, you tackle one problem at a time. That’s why you break down your system into all the different interactions: you want to improve your system without losing all the good things.

The best way to deal with a harm is to remove whatever’s causing it – in TRIZ this is called Trimming. However, the component that’s causing the problems may also have some useful actions: the power of the Trimming Rules is that they guide you to remove the component but without losing any of its useful actions.

The Trimming Rules are a list of questions you ask to see if you can find another way of getting the useful actions a component delivers – without the component:

• Do we need its useful actions? If no, trim it.
• Could the object perform the useful actions itself? If yes, trim the subject.
• Could another component perform the useful actions? If yes, trim it.
• Could a resource perform the useful actions? If yes, trim it.
• Could we trim the component after its useful actions? If yes, trim it.
• Could we trim any harmful parts of the component? If yes, trim it.

Sometimes the constraints of your situation don’t allow you to explore Trimming. When this is the case, you can apply other Standard Solutions for dealing with harm: those which tackle just the harmful actions, leaving your useful actions untouched. This is such a powerful tool for problem solving that it’s covered separately in Chapter 14.

You can also deal with harms in three other ways:

• Block the harm: Stop the harm having an effect.
• Turn the harm into a good: Find a way to get a benefit from the harm.
• Correct the harm: Accept that the harm will happen, then correct its effects afterwards.

Multiple solutions may be suggested for each of these, but it’s worth remembering the broad categories, as they alone can suggest solutions to everyday problems. From the example in Figure 13-1 of a colleague annoying you, you can think of simple solutions from these categories:

• Block the harm: Counteract by being super-nice or ‘love-bombing’ the person. Perhaps he’s being annoying because he’s anxious or worried; even if not, your behaviour will be so confusing he may abandon trying to wind you up and leave you alone.
• Turn the harm into a good: Treat it as a learning experience. Observe all the annoying behaviour and make a note to yourself to never do this to another person.
• Correct the harm: Accept it’s going to happen, and correct the effects of the annoyance on yourself by going for a long walk, eating a bar of chocolate or blowing off some steam to a friend later.

Improving Insufficient Actions

Very often you have something you want but you don’t get enough of it: how much you’re paid was mentioned above, but other examples could be stopping a car in the rain or cardboard cartons protecting eggs in your grocery shopping. If this is the case, it’s described as useful, but insufficient. In an ideal world you’d get more of it. Fortunately, you can apply the Standard Solutions for improving insufficiency.

If you’re not certain whether you’re getting enough of something good, mark it as insufficient because this prompts you to look for ways to improve it. You’ll be encouraged to find even better solutions and to continually challenge yourself to improve your system. You can always decide later that no improvements are necessary, but at least you’re identifying as many possible opportunities to improve as possible.

Sometimes, there are useful actions that you want but you don’t currently have: these are missing actions. These are sometimes hard to include in a Function Analysis (see Chapter 12 for more on these), because when you’re drawing a Function Map, you’re describing the state of the situation as it currently is, rather than thinking about other things that you want. However, if they occur to you, include them, perhaps marking them slightly differently, such as with a different kind of dot in the arrow line. They can be treated in the same way as insufficient actions: they’re just insufficient to the point of not currently existing!

Measuring and Detecting

The requirement to measure or detect something is a particular type of problem. If you’re looking to measure or detect a particular parameter, for example, temperature, you can use the Effects Database to find specific ways the world has found to measure temperature, weight or volume.

However, sometimes your circumstances or the nature of the problem make it very hard to measure or detect; Standard Solutions offer you inventive suggestions of ways around the measurement or detection.

There are three broad categories of suggestions:

• Change the system so no need exists to measure or detect.

  This means understanding what the impact of the measurement or detection will be and focusing your attention on achieving this outcome itself; this can mean making part of your system self-serving, bypassing any need to measure or detect. For example, if you’re measuring something so you can take an action when it goes over a certain level, make the system self-adjusting or with an auto cut-off.

• Measure a copy.

  For example, if you want to measure something that’s dangerous to get close to or moves very fast, such as a snake, you can take a picture and measure from that.

• Introduce something that generates a field you can measure.

  For example, the outline of certain internal digestive organs is difficult to distinguish in an X-ray. To make them easier to see, patients can ingest barium, which shows up very brightly on X-ray. The barium coats the organs and the radiologist can see the barium very clearly, which tells them what the internal organs look like.

Use these approaches when for some reason it’s hard to measure something. If you just need to measure something and you know how it can be done, you don’t have a difficult problem – you can just do it. For example, if you want to measure your weight, you just stand on some scales: the problem isn’t hard, so you don’t need an inventive solution.

You need the Standard Solutions for Measurement and Detection when measuring or detecting something is challenging, as this situation requires you to be inventive. For example, monitoring someone’s brain activity is hard to do directly; even if you could see through someone’s skull, you can’t map which parts of the brain are in use with the naked eye. You can measure electrical activity in the brain with an EEG machine, but this has very low spatial resolution. For this reason, clever measurement instruments have been developed that measure brain activity by proxy. Another brain-imaging method is fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), which applies a strong magnetic field to the brain. Oxygen-rich blood responds differently to oxygen-poor blood, and the fMRI can map the flow of oxygen-rich blood in the brain: when a part of the brain is more active, it needs more blood, so activity can be detected via blood flow rather than by trying to monitor the activity itself.

The full list of Standard Solutions for Measurement and Detection is available in Appendix E, but it’s worth starting with these three broad classes, of which the first is the most bold: remove the need to measure or detect. This isn’t the way the world is going, as ever-more systems, particularly management systems, employ more and more detailed measurement. Quotas, targets and other measures are routinely used in all kinds of organisation – businesses, schools, hospitals, prisons, universities – in an attempt to monitor performance, so changes can be made if necessary to improve the performance. It would be much more inventive to change systems so the effort is put directly into the performance without any measurement required.

The Prime Output is what your system exists to deliver: its main purpose.

Radcliffe, whose marathon running strategy is mentioned in the preceding sidebar, said she didn’t see the point of keeping targets as she wasn’t going to slow down if she was doing better than expected. Her attitude is equally applicable in other fields: if you focus all your attention and energy on getting the performance you really want, you may do significantly better, partly because the energy and effort you put into measuring and monitoring your performance is redirected towards the outcome you want. Many professions are currently subjected to lots of performance measurement and management, such as nursing and teaching, which take time and energy away from their prime functions and towards administration. Greater trust may produce greater results (and more happy, productive people).

As with the other Standard Solutions, those for measuring are generated from engineering and scientific solutions, and are very useful when developing new technical solutions for measuring and detecting. The detail of the Standard Solutions often suggests very technical systems, for example one of the suggestions is using resonance or an object’s resonant frequency.

However, there’s no reason why these solutions can’t be used for more general problem solving or management systems. Most organisations have systems for measuring all kinds of things: staff performance, sales figures, profit and loss and so on. The Standard Solutions, particularly in their broad classes, are useful for finding inventive solutions for all these measurement issues.

Applying the Standard Solutions

As soon as you have a well-formulated problem or series of problems, you can apply the Standard Solutions to generate inventive new solutions. We’ll go through the steps you need to take to use the Standard Solutions, and apply them to a real-world problem.

Tackling a real problem

Let’s look at a real-life scenario, and consider how Standard Solutions could help us generate useful solutions for dealing with noise in intensive care units (ICUs), the problem described in Chapter 12.

Intensive care units are noisy places: very ill patients are attached to monitors (equipment that measures heart rate, blood pressure, breathing and so on), which sound a noisy alarm if a patient’s vital signs change in a worrying way, requiring a doctor or nurse to attend to the patient, check him and turn the alarm off. Many other sources of noise also exist: ventilators, telephones, radios, televisions and also staff talking to each other around the patients’ beds and across the ward. All this noise can disrupt patients’ sleep, causing them stress, contributing to delirium and resulting in poor health outcomes. Let’s consider how some of the Standard Solutions could generate useful solutions to these problems (the full Function Map for this situation can be found in Chapter 12):

Step 1: Complete Function Analysis (done in Chapter 12).

Step 2: Recognise that the two largest causes of disruptive noise are monitors and staff talking.

Step 3: Avoid removing monitors or staff completely, as doing so would involve too large a change (both medical and hospital practice).

Step 4: Consider the noise created by monitors and staff talking, as shown in Figure 13-2.

Step 5: Apply Standard Solutions.

H2.1 Counteract the noise with an opposing field that neutralises the noise.

This suggests using other sounds to block out the noise: white noise or ocean sounds (improves sleep by about 40 per cent). A resultant benefit is increasing patient confidentiality (it’s harder to hear staff talking about other patients).

H2.3 Change the zone and/or duration of the noise to decrease its effects.

This suggests reducing the amount of loud talking that occurs between doctors and nurses by tackling either where or when the conversations happen. Some neonatal ICUs remove the patients to private rooms for treatment, so that the necessary dialogue between members of staff doesn’t disturb other patients. Some ICUs have also tried implementing quiet times during the day and night, when no visitors are allowed, all radios and TVs are switched off and staff are asked to keep their voices low.

H2.4.1 Insulate from the noise by introducing a new component or substance.

This suggests adding something to insulate from noise: ear muffs and ear plugs have been tried (improves sleep by about 25 per cent).

H2.7 Protect part of the system from noise.

If you can’t do everything you want, protect parts, starting with the most important. In this case, it suggests separating the most critically ill patients (who require more staff intervention) from the those recovering from surgery, so the latter are in a quieter zone.

H2.8 Reduce the noise by using a weaker action and enhancing it only where required.

Some hospitals have created quiet zones around patients by asking staff to keep their voices down and creating soundproofed clear offices in the middle of the ward where the nurses and doctors can talk freely.

H2.9 Use sub-systems/details of components to stop the noise.

This suggests creating devices with other types of alarm, for example lights, or using a noise that can somehow be heard only by doctors and nurses. Another idea is to find quieter ventilators.

H2.10 Use super-systems/the environment to stop the noise.

This suggests using soundproofing on the windows and noise-absorbing materials in the walls, and lowering ceilings to absorb ambient noise and reverberations of unavoidable noise.

Step 6: Apply as many of these solutions as possible to create a much quieter environment.

Improving a solution

Sometimes you’ve got something good but it’s just not good enough. And being a TRIZ problem solver, you want to make it better! The Standard Solutions contain 35 suggestions for improving any insufficient useful actions, which you can apply to improve the humble toilet brush. I figure if I can explain this using a toilet brush as an example, you should be able to apply it to any problem!

A toilet brush is something most people are familiar with, and the design hasn’t significantly changed for some time. Let’s imagine you’re a toilet brush designer, and want to create a better brush:

Step 1: Complete a Function Analysis of the situation, as shown in Figure 13-3.

Step 2: Pick a place to start problem solving. As the Prime Function of this system is ‘brush – moves – debris’, start with the brush.

Step 3: Trim the subject: as a toilet brush designer, you may not want to start by removing your system completely (although this will generate very deep trimming, as described in Chapter 14). In this instance, move on to the other Standard Solutions.

Step 4: Pick an SaO to improve. As the Prime Function in this example is insufficient, this is the most obvious place to start. Look to improve ‘brush – moves – debris’.

Step 5: Look up the relevant Standard Solutions, replacing the SaO in the Standard Solutions with those in your SaO.

i1.1 Add something to or inside the toilet brush or debris.

This could suggest making the toilet brush handle hollow, and adding bleach or some other detergent inside the brush that’s automatically dispensed in use.

i1.3 Use the external environment to enhance/provide the function of ‘move debris’.

This suggests changing the toilet bowl in some way (potentially outside of your constraints, but worth considering). Encourage the debris to move by vibrating the toilet bowl, or adding a ‘cleaning’ setting to the toilet, which dispenses a small amount of water from the cistern to aid the cleaning process. You could make a non-stick toilet bowl.

i1.4 Change or add something to the environment/surroundings of the toilet brush and debris.

Perhaps you could add something to the water in the cistern that either makes the toilet bowl less easy to stick to or aids cleaning by loosening the debris.

i2.1 Segment the toilet brush or debris: increase the degree of fragmentation or divide into smaller units.

You could fragment the bristles: either have many more thin bristles to improve the cleaning action or have micro-bristles on the ends of each bristle.

i2.2 Introduce voids, fields, air, bubbles, foam and so on into the toilet brush or debris.

This could suggest adding foam: perhaps you create a foaming bleach or some other detergent to increase the useful action.

i2.10 Improve a system by changing components/substances to deliver exactly what’s needed in time and/or space.

Perhaps you could develop a disposable toilet brush: one of the problems identified in the Function Map was that the dirty toilet brush sits in a holder. If the bristles were only there when needed (that is, when cleaning the toilet), that harm would be eliminated.

i.a.2 Add another action from existing components.

The action is ‘move’, which suggests adding another action somehow. Perhaps in addition to the mechanical action, you could add a water jet (water is available). You could imagine a toilet brush that sprays water in addition to using the bristles.

i.a.4 Change from a uniform action (move) to an action with predetermined patterns.

This suggests that, rather than a single movement, you vibrate the bristles. An analogous system is the toothbrush (apologies for the analogy in this setting!) – perhaps you could invent a vibrating toilet brush or even a sonic toilet brush!

Step 6: Combine the ideas.

You could imagine putting a number of these ideas together: creating a vibrating toilet brush that also sprays either water or detergent from the handle and has smaller bristles.