Upend The Problem
Look at your task from another perspective
Genrikh Altshuller, a Soviet engineer, inventor, and writer, was born in 1926 in Tashkent. Tashkent is the capital of present-day Uzbekistan, which was a part of the Soviet Union at the time.
Altshuller became famous for the creation of the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, aka TRIZ (the acronym comes from the Russian title of the theory).
Before his work, the invention process was thought to result from a magic spark. An engineer thinks about the problem, and then, one day, she miraculously sees a solution. Altshuller proved that people can create ideas by following an algorithm. He called it ARIZ, or the Algorithm of Inventive Problem Solving.
We can apply this algorithm to product development and strategic thinking.
The hot pot problem
The algorithm starts with a contradiction. If there is no contradiction, there is no problem.
For instance, you need a pot to heat water on the stove. But the pot gets hot too, and we can’t take it from the stove with bare hands.
Linear thinking would lead us to the creation of a specialized tool for taking hot pans. It would be a complex and expensive solution. But Altshuller’s approach implies we must look for the most straightforward and cheapest solution.
Altshuller loved to say that the perfect tool is the one when there is no tool, but the job is done. When there is no tool, the solution is simple and not expensive.
So, the algorithm looks like this:
Define the Apparent Contradiction (AC). For instance, the pot gets hot too, and if we try to take it from the stove with bare hands, we may get burned.
Find the In-Depth Contradiction (IDC). This is an innate contradiction between some parts of the system in question. The pot inevitably gets hot when we heat the water.
Define the Detailed In-Depth Contradiction (DIDC). The DIDC may look weird and unrealistic at first glance. But it makes us look at the problem from a new perspective, unleashing our creativity. In our case, it may sound like “the water is hot, and the pot must be hot and cold at the same time.”
Formulate the Perfect Solution (PS). A PS for the hot pot problem may look like “We can take the pot from the stove without additional tools (there is no tool but the job is done).”
Not all the pot parts must be hot to heat the water. So, we make pot handles of heat-resistance materials.
The parking lot problem
A company’s executives learn that the corporate parking lot is too small. Not all the employees can park their cars, so they must find a parking place outside. Many employees get upset and think about quitting.
The Apparent Contradiction (AC) – employees have to park outside.
The In-Depth Contradiction (IDC) – there is not enough space at the parking lot to accommodate all the cars.
The Detailed In-Depth Contradiction (DIDC) – the parking lot must be spacious enough to accommodate all the cars during the working day, but we don’t invest a cent to make it bigger.
The Perfect Solution (PS) – all the employees perform their work, but the parking lot remains the same size.
The simplest solution would be to build a new parking lot. But the TRIZ motivates us to look for other options, such as:
We can arrange a shift work so that not all the employees have to come to the office at the same time.
We can arrange a corporate cab or bus service for some of them.
We can outsource some and lay off some staffers.
We can let some employees work from home 2-3 days a week.
TRIZ and strategy
Altshuller’s principle that “the perfect tool is the one when there is no tool but the job is done” is applicable to business problem-solving. For instance, Uber or Uber-like services are good examples of such thinking. There is no taxi cab company, but people get rides.
We can apply the ARIZ, or the Algorithm of Inventive Problem Solving, to different business task solving, from product development to new business model creation.
We just need to look at the problem from the other point of view.