Soft Side of TRIZ

Jack HippleJack Hipple

In the late 1960's Boris Zlotin and other original TRIZ Masters of Altshuller came up with a very clever "reverse" method of using TRIZ principles. This application goes by several different names such as Anticipatory Failure Determination™ and Predictive Failure Analysis™. The basic principle is to invert the classical TRIZ problem solving algorithm as follows (we'll use an organizational as opposed to a technical problem as an example):

  1. State the Ideal Result: We want to make sure that all of our employees know all they need to know to do their jobs to sustain the organization's objective
  2. Invert this statement: We do not want our employees to know what they need to know to assist their organization in achieving its goals
  3. Exaggerate the inverted Ideal Final Result statement. (This is the key mental step that may be hard to do just as the normal TRIZ ideal result is difficult to express): We NEVER want our employees to have the information they need to assist the organization in achieving its goals.
  4. What resources are available to achieve this "inverted ideality"? Are they available? Can they be created?