Narrative Ecology – Blog of Ron Donaldson – fACILITATOR, TRAINER AND COACH

This is undeniably the least understood and most misunderstood part of my work.

I met Karen Gadd (author of TRIZ for Engineers) at a Knowledge Management Conference about 18 years ago, where we were both invited to run sessions as fringe subjects, Karen on TRIZ and me on ‘storytelling’.

We immediately connected over a mutual interest in each other’s topic and because the rest was so boring in comparison.

I went on the TRIZ courses and was quickly offered a contract with Oxford Creativity teaching and facilitating TRIZ. The website is packed full of further information,

TRIZ translates roughly into the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving and was created by a man called Altschuler who worked in a patent office and became fascinated by the repeated conceptual patterns he began to notice. He wondered if he could extract and bottle these inventive patterns to train engineers how to shortcut invention, innovation and creative thinking.

To cut a long story short, he did just that and created a methodology and set of tools different from any other.

If you have a problem or even just an existing system, TRIZ can suggest adjacent possibles and can illuminate the most likely solution path, based upon observed patterns from patents.

It’s trick is to make all its suggestions conceptual rather than specific and allow the human mind to apply this to the problem at hand.

The three core conceptual suggesters are:

Innovative Principles – to be applied to your problem

Trends of innovation – the likely direction of innovation

Standard solutions – ie blocking harms, increasing benefits or measuring and providing feedback.

All three are derived from large numbers of specific innovations, conceptualised into generalised problem and solutions which you can then pull down and apply to your specific system.

Only very recently has TRIZ been discussed in the mainstream. Rory Sutherland (one of my all time heros in Behavioural Economics) posted this in the latest Spectator magazine:

It has always surprised me that the best attempt to formulate a theory of innovation came from the Soviet Union. TRIZ, or the ‘theory of inventive problem solving’, was the work of the naval officer Genrikh Altshuller, whose helpful advice to Stalin earned him a spell in the gulag. Yet the Soviet origins of TRIZ should not be surprising: Altshuller enjoyed an extra level of insight because he was observing western innovation from the outside.

One of the central principles of TRIZ holds that ‘Your problem has already been solved – it has just been solved in a field other than your own.’ 

The deeper I go into TRIZ the more I would recommend that it should be a compulsory first day (at least) for all engineering degrees, in fact it is so useful to non-engineering problems that it should be compulsory on all degrees.

The way we teach it at Oxford Creativity includes ‘how to think like a genius’, ways to represent and explore a system diagramatically such that you can clearly see the good and the bad, examining situations through the lens of time and scale and how to quality check and compare your solutions.

More on TRIZ in forthcoming posts.