In This Chapter

Avoiding a bad start with TRIZ

Recognising the wrong kind of problems

Spotting common problem-solving mistakes

Having been round the block a few times with TRIZ, I see the same old mistakes time and again. This chapter describes the ten commonest pitfalls I try to steer my clients clear of, both when starting off with TRIZ and when tackling real-world problems.

Thinking TRIZ Doesn’t Apply to You

If I received a pound every time someone told me that TRIZ wouldn’t help him because the problems in his industry are completely unique, I’d be, well, loaded. However, believing that your problems are unlike anyone else’s is flawed thinking – and not very TRIZzy.

People often ask to see case studies demonstrating TRIZ’s application in their specific, often narrow, field before they believe it can be useful. The logic of TRIZ is that the same fundamental problems occur again and again across all industries and applications. One of TRIZ’s greatest strengths is its fabulous pedigree of applying engineering and scientific research to create solutions. You can thus rest assured that you’re actually reapplying tried and tested relevant proven solutions to solve your problems and meet your needs. This doesn’t mean that TRIZ is only useful for engineering and scientific problems. Many of the TRIZ tools and approaches model the innovative thinking of creative problem solvers, which means you can re-create their patterns of thinking to deal with any kind of issue. More importantly, the logic of TRIZ tells you to lift your head and look beyond the detail of your own field. At the very heart of TRIZ is the philosophy that you can learn from the experience of others and that your situation is not unique. Someone else has seen something similar in the past, and parallels will exist elsewhere if you only know how to look for them.

I’ve used TRIZ to understand problems and find solutions in the biosciences, local government, education, marketing, fast-moving consumer goods, industrial chemistry, engineering, software, management, construction, product design, packaging and more. The proof of the pudding’s in the eating, so if you think TRIZ hasn’t been used in your industry and want to see if it will work, be an innovator and try it yourself!

Waiting for the ‘Right’ Problem

Don’t wait for a problem to come along that seems to match the TRIZ process perfectly. I’ve heard people say they wanted to wait until they found a suitably complicated problem that would show off TRIZ in the best way or they haven’t yet got a problem hard enough to justify its use. TRIZ is a problem-solving toolkit – it can help you with any kind of problem.

Identify a problem or situation you’re facing right now. Even if the issue seems trivial or you believe it can’t be resolved with an ideal solution, as a result of lack of knowledge or implementation constraints, still give TRIZ a go. If applying new thinking to this problem will help you get started with the TRIZ tools, and you can learn from your experience, it will be time well spent. Don’t worry about using TRIZ perfectly; simply use the tools, reflect on the process and the outcomes and then work out what you can do better next time. Start with the tools you feel most comfortable with and are excited by and become comfortable with using those first. You’re better off using a bit of TRIZ a lot of the time than all the TRIZ tools never!

Starting Too Big

Trying to solve the most difficult, intractable problem that your industry’s been grappling with for 30 years can be discouraging. While you’re gaining familiarity and confidence with the TRIZ tools and processes, start with smaller problems, preferably urgent ones that you need to be looking at soon anyway. TRIZ is uniquely powerful for the most challenging problems, and it is very tempting to start there, but large, complex problems can be daunting when you’re at the beginning of your TRIZ journey.

Work your way up to these very difficult problems, starting with problems that are a bit more manageable. If you had just taken up running, you wouldn’t start by trying to run a marathon on your first day: you would train and maybe start with a few shorter races and work your way towards a marathon once you had developed your running skills and stamina. It’s the same with problem solving: get familiar with the tools and the processes before you start on the hardest problem in your industry. That way, when you’re working on the most difficult challenges, you can devote all of your considerable brain power to the problem at hand, not working out how to use the tools.

If you really want to start with something difficult, work on this difficult problem with someone experienced with TRIZ, so that person can guide you in the use of the tools where necessary.

Tackling Problems for Which You Can’t Implement Solutions

World peace is desired by everybody, and the idea of applying TRIZ to make it a reality is appealing. Resolving conflict is a huge problem that nobody knows how to tackle – perhaps TRIZ could help? Applying TRIZ tools would give you greater understanding of the underlying problems that prevent world peace and also reveal some useful solutions. However, for most people, many of the solutions that TRIZ may come up with, such as changing diplomatic tactics, are beyond the scope of their control and problem solving becomes merely an academic exercise. (If any major world leaders are reading this book, however, do feel free to get in touch – I’m sure TRIZ can help!)

Looking at problems outside of your scope of influence – for example, changing the behaviour of your boss – will make you feel discouraged; you may devise genius solutions but you’ll be unable to put them into practice. If you can reframe the problem to make it implementable by you, such as what you can do to help bring about less conflict or deal better with senior management, then it’s worth tackling.

Tackling Problems without Involving the Problem Owner

If a problem needs to be solved, you need to involve the people who are responsible for that issue or area.

I’ve heard people suggest not involving problem owners because they were involved in its creation in the first place or they may be resistant to new ways of thinking about its resolution. In fact, that’s why the problem owners must be involved. If they were on the ground as the problem manifested itself, they’ll have crucial, detailed, inside knowledge that no one else possesses. You can use that information to help you better understand the problem and how it may be resolved. If you’re looking for new ideas or ways of thinking, the problem owners can take your suggestions and consider what may prevent them from working; these issues can thus be tackled one by one at an early stage. Such problem-finding behaviour will be really valuable and should be regarded in a positive light.

The problem owners are the people responsible for implementing the solutions! People rarely like being told to implement someone else’s ideas; being cut out of their development can make them feel disenfranchised, disengaged and annoyed. In contrast, being involved in the development of the solutions means they’ll feel motivated to implement them, which will make the process smoother.

Trying to Solve Problems When You Don’t Understand the Issue or the Technology

TRIZ is best with facts and real-world, nitty-gritty problems. If you don’t actually understand how something works, you won’t be able to apply TRIZ. To be fair, you won’t be able to do any real problem solving without TRIZ either. This is a universal truth: you wouldn’t ask a surgeon to build a bridge or construction engineers to do a heart transplant.

This is also true of parts of the problem: if you don’t understand how individual elements of your system work, you need to either get the experts in the room or find out yourself. TRIZ will supplement, extend and make best use of your knowledge – it is not a substitute.

Trying to Solve Problems When You Lack Crucial Knowledge

This issue is subtly different to not understanding the issue or technology, described in the preceding section. Sometimes you need to know the relevant data to effectively tackle a problem; for example, to improve safety you need to know where, why and when the dangers exist in your situation or system; to come up with an improvement to a product, you need to know exactly who’s buying it so you can better meet their needs; to streamline a process, you need to know how long each individual step in it takes; and to cut costs, you need to know exactly how much each individual element of your system costs – and all the useful things it does.

Before you can carry out any useful problem solving, you have to source the specific data needed. Without those data you won’t be problem solving, you’ll be guessing. Do some research. If the data are difficult to find or get, working out how to get them could be a TRIZzy problem to solve.

A caveat to this is that TRIZ can also help you work out what you need to know more precisely. Sometimes you know you don’t have all the information required but you haven’t worked out exactly what it is you need to know. TRIZ can help you map what you do know and highlight and define the areas where you need to find out more – and give you structured questions to find the information you need very efficiently.

Working on a Problem That’s Already Been Solved

Sometimes people want to reapply the TRIZ process to a problem to see if it arrives at the same solution. Their logic is that they know the solution is innovative, and if TRIZ comes up with it again, it proves that TRIZ works. However, if you already know ‘the answer’, which actually is just one solution, you will then be afflicted by psychological inertia.

Working on problems as an academic exercise is less effective than dealing with real problems for two reasons:

• The answer has already been thought of, and constrains everyone’s thinking. Every direction TRIZ suggests will seem to point to this solution, because that’s what people have in their minds. If people explicitly try not to think about it, it’s even worse; if I ask you to think of anything except a blue penguin, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Exactly.
• People lack motivation. It doesn’t really matter if you find a solution or not; however, real problem solving is exciting partly because the outcome’s unknown. That sense of challenge can be a great motivator and is absent when a problem’s already been solved.

These problems can be circumvented if a different team works on the same problem, of course. However, creating a different team is almost impossible if you’re working on a real problem because you still need to involve the problem owner and relevant subject matter experts.

Undertaking TRIZ by Stealth

TRIZ is useful for problem solving both on your own and with other people. However, if you try to cunningly lead your colleagues through the TRIZ problem-solving process without telling them the reason, they’ll become suspicious about why you’re trying to direct their thinking. That approach will be self-defeating anyway because they’ll probably resist your efforts.

If you want to explicitly step through a TRIZ exercise with your colleagues, be open with them about the logic of what you’re doing and why. Start small: for example, with a 30–60-minute session on capturing the Ideal Outcome (Chapter 9), or by charting the context of your situation in Time and Scale (Chapter 8), or by directed brainstorming with the 40 Inventive Principles to resolve a contradiction you’ve identified (Chapter 3).

This isn’t to say that TRIZ thinking can’t shape how you talk to others about problems in a useful way. Encouraging others to look at things in a new light – by being open to different ideas, searching for analogies, identifying the concepts behind ideas and talking about Ideal solutions – can be helpful for everyone, and you can pass on some of the TRIZ philosophy without any direct TRIZ training or exposure.

Giving Up Too Soon

If you’re not getting the kind of solutions you want, take a break and then have another look at your problem. Have you scoped it correctly? Do you need to hit the problem with even more TRIZ (definitely)? Perhaps you’ll find more innovative solutions at a level higher. Have you followed the process or skipped a few steps? If you have, go back and fill in the gaps. Is your Ideal Outcome really Ideal or did you try to make it more pragmatic? Your Ideal should stretch you. Go back and rework it. TRIZ helps you find solutions that exactly match your needs – if you don’t start off with all the right needs, your TRIZ solutions will reflect this – including the gaps.

If you’ve come up with a range of imperfect solutions, develop them further. Consider constructing an Ideality Plot first (see Chapter 11); Maybe your ideas aren’t as bad as you think. Start with those ideas that give you most of what you want even if they have big problems – in fact, especially if they have big problems. These are contradictions, and you know how to solve them! Now you have a route forward to even better solutions.

I’ve never worked through the TRIZ process and run out of something to do. You can always do more, and the more TRIZ work you do, the better your solutions will be. Biographies of great inventors always describe a point at which something went wrong and they didn’t give up. Edison, da Vinci and pals kept trying, and eventually found what they needed. You now have the tools and the processes to help you do that too. Keep going!