High-Powered Thinking Machines
I was invited to an innovation meeting to discuss powerful technologies that make it easier to solve technical problems. For weeks, I have been chewing over what tools I want to present, and I will share them with you below. Let’s start by clarifying what I mean by innovation: implementing a significantly better product, service, process, marketing method, or organizational method, a notion I take from the Oslo Manual. Let us understand that what is innovative may or may not be new, but it must ALWAYS be substantially better.
Innovation is distinct from invention, which relates to creating something new, registrable as intellectual or industrial property (or Creative Commons, whichever you prefer).
- Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ)
This method was created by Genrich Altshuller, an engineer and sailor born in Uzbekistan. During World War II, this gentleman reviewed hundreds of thousands of patents as part of his work and discovered that inventiveness follows a pattern.
Altshuller wrote an airy letter to Stalin to share his findings, but Stalin didn’t like what he read and sent him to Siberia. Isolated, cold-shitted, and subjected to forced labor, Altshuller perfected his ideas and exchanged his knowledge with other inmates. When he was released after Stalin's death, Genrich migrated to the United States, where he continued researching and writing sci-fi stories.
TRIZ has a strange reputation; some consider it a cult or a lodge with secret members. Anyway, I have corroborated its usefulness in addressing technical problems. As an illustrative example, I share two crucial principles that I suggest you to explore:
The solution to the problem must come from the system itself. This premise relates directly to the famous and misunderstood figure of “thinking outside the box” that stems from the experiment created by German psychologist Karl Duncker. The experiment goes like this:
At eye level and on a table, three small candles are placed side by side; some thumbtacks are also placed, and three little cardboard boxes the size of a matchbox, with different shapes and colors. The person participating in the experiment is asked to hold the candle to the wall, which he or she will do by fixing the boxes with the thumbtacks to place the candles on them. The solution seems obvious, but what often happens is that people try to stick the candle to the wall directly, melting the wax to use it as glue; this is due, Duncker explains, to our functional fixations (the boxes understood as containers for tacks rather than as candle holders), which must be broken for ingenuity to find new ways.
Duncker was correct in explaining that the habitual uses we attribute to things influence how we solve problems, so we must “think outside the box” and discover new uses for our resources in the system. If you don’t know the context of the expression, you might think that “thinking outside the box” is “finding solutions outside the system,” but it’s not, okay? Now that you know the truth, please stop reproducing that misconception.
Altshuller established that inventive dilemmas are often solved by playing the same elements differently, as evidenced by Duncker’s research, published contemporaneously with Altshuller’s forced retirement in Siberia.
Altshuller’s other crucial idea is that inventiveness problems are closely related to identifying and solving technical contradictions. The crux of the matter is to find and solve these contradictions by combining the system's elements (human capital, infrastructure, financial resources, natural resources).
This sounds very good, but Althuller himself warns that innovation always has undesirable effects (which could be considered a third principle to consider), i.e., that despite our efforts to resolve technical contradictions, the thread will tend to break somewhere. Altshuller himself systematized the most recurrent undesirable effects in a contradiction matrix.
According to Altshuller, the most potent methods to solve problems are:
- Do it inversely
- Change the state of the physical property
- Do it in advance
- Do a little less
- “Matreshka”
To explore and practice them, I suggest you consult And Suddenly the Inventor Appeared; several companies have packaged TRIZ elements into solutions for quick reference and workshop implementation. For example, you can try these digital cards from Idea Plant here. The same firm markets the cards in printed versions; try the digital version before you go running like a headless chicken to buy the cards.
2. Systematic Inventive Thinking. A few years ago, Drew Boyd and Jacob Goldenberg published the book Inside the Box, which synthesizes the tools of Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT), a framework they developed with Roni Horowitz and Amnon Levav to make TRIZ more fluid and more accessible to apply.
In his doctoral dissertation and the book’s predecessor, Horowitz, among other principles, advocates the ideation of closed-world solutions (thinking outside the box but inside the system) as a condition for the SIT approach to work. The book's title winks at Duncker’s experiment, and you are seeking “ultra-disruptive” solutions that involve resources you don’t have hehehe.
SIT’s mental operations are as follows: subtraction, multiplication, division, task unification, and attribute dependency. If you want to learn how they work, browse this Harvard Business Review article.
When I took the SIT course with the eponymous firm, I received a beautiful set of cards with instructions for each mental operation; unfortunately, this material cannot be disseminated, nor have I identified specific toolkits or card games for this framework. If you know of any that work well, I would love to know about them!
3. Brainstorming with SCAMPER. Bob Eberle created this widely used acronym based on Alex Osborn’s Applied Imagination method. You can learn more about it and brainstorm correctly here if you need more context.
The acronym refers to seven mental processes that can be used to solve technical problems. Just in case you don’t know them, I would like to clarify that they are the following: Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Change Purpose, Eliminate, and Reverse.
Recently, the innovation firm iLab, founded by Victor Moctezuma, launched the educational material Have Bad Ideas, a card game that includes, among other components, the SCAMPER operations. This material is very well presented and helpful for ideation workshops where you want to scrutinize problems of different scales.
But…
TRIZ, SIT, and SCAMPER are models with different assumptions that start from the standard premise that a problem can be solved if approached in the right way. Of course, the problems we are talking about must have identifiable causes, even if these are not known at a first approximation: wicked problems are animals of a different species that require complex frameworks to unravel them, let alone solve them.
After trying these different paths, the unavoidable task (emphasized by all three) is to know the context of the problem. This is where we fail most often because overdiagnosis has become a great reluctance to investigate.
Put your Post-it notes on hold. This is where I explain that understanding the phases of the problem, mapping the key actors involved, and identifying the resources that can be used to solve the technical contradiction, among other aspects, is crucial for the success of the process. No matter how many papers, toolkits, or sets of cards you use, if you don’t investigate the context, your approach will be awful.
That is why, although I present it as an epilogue, the First Principles Compass is the first step I suggest you use. I propose returning to ask yourself the right questions and not lose your way. It is a set of crucial questions that draws from Aristotelian first principles, TRIZ, SIT, Francis Aguilar’s ETPS acronym, and other ninja tricks I have learned.
Notice how the compass can be filled in any order you prefer, but always start by stating the problem regarding its undesirable effects.
Conclusions
With these tools, I have improved (and with the help of a team of people more ingenious than me) the production process of the magazine I co-edit, Economía Creativa, and a diversity of processes and forms of organization in different companies.
No tool offers total solutions in isolation; combining these machines to think and be accompanied by the right human talent is necessary so the possible ideas can be modeled, prototyped, and implemented.
What are your high-powered thinking machines?
