Think TRIZ for Creative Problem Solving !

What's your secret for staying in business? Is it continuous quality improvement? Define-measure-

analyze-improve-control (DMAIC) and design for Six Sigma (DFSS)? Plan-do-check-act (PDCA)? Plan-do-study-act (PDSA)? Quality circles? Process improvement? Total quality management? Kaizen? Or just plain old troubleshooting?

No matter what you call it, the vast majority of successful organizations have some way of tracking down their problems and doing something about them. The quality profession has been at the center of both the tracking and the doing since its birth.

Quality improvement has grown from simple inspection to inspection with statistical process control to the array of analysis tools and teamwork methodologies now used to create and deliver services and products that do what our customers require. These tools work: In product and service development and delivery, we're able to identify problems and determine whether they're the result of special or common causes. We protect our customers by immediate corrective action, and we protect our business and customers by preventing future problems.

So why do we need new methods, tools and techniques for creativity? Because identifying a problem and its root causes doesn't always give us the ideas we need to find a solution. For at least the last 10 years, quality improvement leaders have been saying that the next step for quality is the merger of quality with creativity. ^1,2

"Standard" quality improvement systems such as DMAIC and PDCA have always incorporated brainstorming as a key method for finding creative solutions to problems. Brainstorming is designed to liberate a team's thinking from past patterns and uncover ideas that people might have unconsciously suppressed. When it works, it's fast, and the team reaches a high level of consensus fairly quickly because the idea is usually improved by the entire team and is seen as a collective product rather than one person's idea.

But brainstorming doesn't always work. If the solution lies outside the experience of the team, this tool won't reveal it. Some teams try to compensate by inviting outsiders to join them for brainstorming sessions. This works if the new members happen to have the information the team needs, but there's been no good method for determining that in advance. It's a classic "Catch-22": If you know what the solution is, then you know whom to invite, but then you don't need to invite them because you know the solution.

TRIZ defined

TRIZ--a Russian acronym for "Theory of Inventive Problem Solving"--is a different kind of creativity system. It's based on the analysis of creative solutions to past problems. TRIZ applies to both continuous improvement and development of new products and services because continuous improvement requires solving current problems, and development requires finding a way to solve customers' problems.

Research on the TRIZ method was done in the former Soviet Union from 1946 to 1985 and has continued globally since then. Quality Digest featured an extensive introduction to the method in its February 2004 issue ("Enhance Six Sigma Creativity With TRIZ").

Two basic principles in TRIZ maintain that:

 Somebody, someplace, has already solved your problem or one similar to it. Creativity means finding that solution and adapting it to the current problem.

 Don't accept compromises. Eliminate them.

The quality improvement profession embraces these principles because quality thinking integrates benchmarking, which is strongly related to the first principle, and eliminating root causes rather than just improving symptoms, which is related to the second.

To illustrate the concept of "Somebody, someplace, has already solved your problem," consider the situation of dairy farmers in California. Producing milk requires handling large quantities of manure. In the past, the manure was dried in large ovens for deodorizing, ship--ping and recycling as fertilizer. But with the increasing cost of energy, drying ovens became uneconomical. The TRIZ method for looking at other technologies for potential solutions starts with restating the problem in general terms, emphasizing the functions being performed, rather than the technology itself. Thus, dairy farmers didn't search for better ways to dry manure; they looked for ways to separate a liquid from solids. A simple search with TRIZ techniques turned up a method, using a hydrophilic gas, in which the gas carries the water molecules away. This method has been used for more than 40 years for concentrating orange juice. ³

Other examples of this principle include:

 The pharmaceutical industry found ways to manage foam in the production process by studying the beer industry.

 Medical information technology requires stringent privacy protection under Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (1996) regulations. Many solutions are being found in systems developed for the banking and securities industries.

 Paint companies have problems with the accumulation of sludge in processing equipment. The nuclear waste disposal industry has found many ways to prevent the buildup of sludge because removing it is extremely difficult and requires shutting down the facility for a long time.

The idea of eliminating problems rather than accepting compromises goes against the grain of standard business and engineering teaching, which emphasizes tradeoffs, cost-benefit analyses and other methods of compromise. TRIZ recognizes two kinds of compromises (frequently called "contradictions"):

 Technical contradictions . These are the classic engineering and business trade-offs in which the desired state can't be reached because something else in the system prevents it. In other words, when something gets better, something else gets worse. Examples include:

 Product gets stronger (i.e., good), but the weight increases (i.e., bad).

 Bandwidth increases (good) but requires more power (bad).

 Service is customized to each customer (good), but the service delivery system becomes complicated (bad).

 Automobile airbags deploy quickly to protect the passenger (good), but the faster they deploy, the more likely they are to injure or kill small or out-of-position people (bad).

 Physical contradictions. Also called "inherent" contradictions, these include situations in which one object or system has contradictory or opposing requirements. Everyday examples abound:

 Surveillance aircraft should fly fast to their destinations but also slowly to collect data over the target.

 Software should be easy to use but include many complex features and options.

 Coffee should be hot for enjoyable drinking but cool enough to prevent burning consumers.

 Training should be thorough but not take too much time.

TRIZ doesn't depend on team members' knowledge or their personal creative capability to solve these problems. The first group, the "technical" or "tradeoff" contradictions, are solved using the 40 principles of problem solving. Many people have expanded on the original TRIZ research to demonstrate that the 40 principles apply to a wide variety of disciplines. (See The TRIZ Journal [www.triz-journal.com] for examples of the 40 principles in chemical engineering, sales, microelectronics, education and quality management, among others.)

The second group, the "physical" or "inherent" contradictions, are eliminated using four basic principles to separate the requirements that appear to be contradictory in time, space, between the parts and the whole, and between the supersystem, system and subsystems.

For example, the airbag problem can be solved at the subsystem level by changing the bag material so that it won't grab the skin of 

the face and twist the head of a small, out-of-position person. The problem can also be solved at the supersystem level, in several ways:

 If the car can't crash because it's part of a super system that knows the positions of all objects and controls their speeds (a technology that's fewer than eight years away, according to some predictions)

 If the structure of the car absorbs the force of the crash, and the airbag isn't needed

 If the social and/or legal system is such that small people never sit in the front passenger seat

TRIZ has been incorporated into the general corporate culture for global companies in a wide variety of industries--Siemens, Samsung, LG, Unilever, Agilent, Hitachi, Dow Chemical, Johnson & Johnson and Delphi are among those that have talked about their TRIZ experiences at recent conferences. Small and medium-sized organizations with less- familiar names are adopting TRIZ to support quality improvement in services, products and systems in fields as diverse as restoring the vitality of a downtown to creating software to improve sales of eyeglasses.

How do you recognize when quality requires creativity? When the solutions that your team creates don't get rid of the root cause. That's a strong indication that unrecognized contradictions are blocking you from finding a good solution, and that TRIZ will be the next tool you need.