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 b…