Soft Side of TRIZ
Jack 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):
- 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
- Invert this statement: We do not want our employees to know what they need to know to assist their organization in achieving its goals
- 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.
- What resources are available to achieve this "inverted ideality"? Are they available? Can they be created?